


A Life Worth Living

by SpaceSealAU



Category: DreamWorks Dragons (Cartoon), How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: A love Story, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Darkfic, Drug Use, M/M, Multi, Necrophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 06:55:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 48,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12525584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceSealAU/pseuds/SpaceSealAU
Summary: Viggo's surprise attack on the dragonriders backfires when Hiccup is accidentally brought down with the others.  Deprived of his prize, Viggo turns his attentions to the next best thing; Tuffnut, a surviving dragonrider, who with a cut and dye job looks almost like the real Hiccup Haddock.  Taken far away to a foreign port and subjected to his captor's sadistic whims, Tuffnut must find a way to survive.  Meanwhile, Viggo's concerned family only want to help him out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the beast I've been working on since before the new season aired. This fic contains some mature subject matter and a lot of just really uncomfortable themes. If you are bothered by dark fics this may not be the story for you.

 

  1. Carcass



 

“Hiccup.” Viggo said firmly, reaching over to lay a hand on the boy’s.  His fingers were cold and damp, and he squeezed them hard, enough that it should hurt a little, but Hiccup didn’t move at all.  Viggo sighed and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.  The boy was pale, his skin almost waxy looking, and an uncomfortable, sweet smell lingered around his head.  

 

He was a thin slip of a figure, his chest beginning to cave and his ribs standing out under the thin, translucent skin of his flanks.  He’d been melting into Viggo’s bed for nearly two weeks, visited daily by the surgeon who had operated on the head wound, but the soft, stitch covered skin on the side of his skull was a shapeless mass.  When Viggo changed the bandages the white, clotted pus clung to the cloth and stunk.  

 

Under the thin blanket the dip of his belly and hips were visible.  He’d stopped trying to put clothing on the boy, tired of cleaning it, but after so long without eating he hardly had to change the sheets at all.  

 

Hiccup’s eyes were open, and for a moment it looked like he was staring at him, but the focus was too far back.  When he leaned closer the eyes followed him, though, and Viggo reminded himself they’ve been doing that ever since.  If there was any intelligence left in those green eyes it was hard to find.

 

The first week, once, he’d tried to push a maces and talons board into the boy’s line of sight, but no matter how he baited him he couldn’t get a reaction.  He’d flailed now and then at first, and despite the gory opening in the boy’s skull viggo had felt a tiny bit of hope that he’d recover.  The idea was absurd now.

 

He sighed and pushed the blanket down, exposing Hiccup’s chest and belly.  The skin was sticky and reeking, Viggo starting to neglect cleaning him, and it was little consolation that he had looked exactly the was he thought he would under the armor.  He lay a palm on the boy’s belly, watching the eyes stare back at him.  The whole plan would have worked perfectly, if Hiccup hadn’t tried to go back to save his friends.  While most of the dragonriders were brought down in the initial chemical attack a few had stayed sputtering and floundering on the surface of the sea.  Hiccup had been struck by a volley aimed to finish off the blonde girl.

 

He should have anticipated that.  Viggo had brought him on deck and ordered medical care as fast as possible, but it had made little difference.  By contrast, the blonde boy who’d been playing possum in the water had been thrown in the brig without so much as a glance.  He wanted to throw him in the oubliette when they returned to land, and let him fight for scraps of flesh like everyone else who annoyed him.

 

He watched those vacant eyes slide off of him and stare into the ceiling. “You simply couldn’t be reasonable, could you.” he complained bitterly at the pale form.  “I gave you a dozen chanced to see what was really going on and come to me, but no, you chose to fight to the bitter end.  Look at you.” he said, pulling the sheet the rest of the way down.  “Look at what you’ve reduced yourself to.”

 

The boy gave no response.  

 

Irritably, Viggo pinched the skin on his belly, twisting hard enough to make a red mark.  The boy jerked and gave a shaky gasp, eyes jittering across the room to Viggo’s face.  The flash of recognition disappeared quickly, and Viggo twisted the boy’s nipple, trying to recapture his regard. Hiccup produced a low, animal whine, head rolling bonelessly on his shoulders.  When Viggo tried again, he only gave the faintest whimper and lay still.

 

“Look at me.” he growled, frustrated with his failure.  “LOOK at me!”

 

A slap had no effect, neither did a second, and he shook Hiccup’s shoulders in boiling frustation that his plan had succeeded but failed so spectacularly.  There was no point in victory without Hiccup’s face to rub it in.  He’d planned to capture him, train him, lovingly reconstruct him like one of his dragons until he was a willing consort.  He’d planned to mark the boy’s body with his brand, and wake in bed next to his content, sleeping form.

 

The boy was in his bed, finally, but it was not what he’d wanted.  He felt like when he was a boy and Ryker had taken him to kill his first hog.  Excitement and pride had immediately given way to horror and regret as the animal had screamed, and screamed, and he’d sawed at it’s throat until he was covered in blood and lines of tiny fleas had begun to pour off the carcass and onto him.

 

He let his hand wander absently down the boy’s unresponsive body, feeling all the little dips and bumps he’d imagined but never gotten to enjoy.  Hiccup made a faint sound, but whether it was distress or not was up for interpretation.  He wondered if the boy was still even capable of feeling pain or fear, or anything.

 

“You ruined me.” he said bitterly, letting his hand continue down Hiccup’s thigh.  “Financially, no, there’s always demand for dragon products but you’ve ruined me none the less.  I haven’t been paying attention to my work since you came along.  You distract me, Hiccup.  You distract me with your earnest speeches and raids.” his hand slid it’s way between Hiccup’s thighs, pulling them apart gently.  The boy’s cock was a small, pale, limp thing, stuck to the sweat of his thigh.  Viggo touched it gingerly, looking up at the boy’s face for a reaction.

 

He gave none.

 

The ember of frustration inside Viggo flared and he squeezed it hard, getting a choked, garbled wail from the boy.  What was visible of his expression under the bandages didn’t change, though, and Viggo grit his teeth, switching instead to feel down the boy’s ass.  He’d daydreamed of plunging his dick in the boy plenty of times, making his squirm and beg and come until all the nonsense worked out of him and he learned to want it.  He’d envisioned fucking him on deck and letting the men watch his perfect little prize arch and moan.  He found Hiccup’s anus with his fingers and rubbed it almost gently for a moment before starting to push in a dry finger.  He watched the boy hitch, but that was all.

 

He grabbed Hiccup’s jaw and forced the boy to face him, slowly working in a second finger and feeling around.  The eyes wandered past his face as he began to slowly move his fingers in and out of the boy.  The skin pulled and caught against his and he hoped the pain got through to him.  He wanted Hiccup to know what he was for before he died.

 

“You were supposed to be mine.” he hissed, standing and looming over the boy.  He could have been anyone for all he seemed to notice.  He slowly began to unlace his trousers, knowing no one else would dare come in here and see him, and almost distractedly pulled his penis out to hang over the front.  He grabbed Hiccup’s hand and guided it to his limp member, curling the boy’s cold fingers around it and squeezing gently.  It wasn’t good enough, his skin was so cold, but he held Hiccup’s fingers in place and began to gently move them up and down, milking his cock until it began to swell and grow.

 

His cold hand and vacant eyes weren’t enough.  Viggo climbed up onto the bed, pushing Hiccup’s legs up and out, which in his limp state made him look like a frog.  For a moment he hovered there, watching the boy’s roving eyes and trying to talk himself out of this.  He’d always felt rape was beneath him, but Hiccup was and always had been a special case.

 

The boy was dry and tight, and as he slowly forced his way inside him it burned.  He should have used lubricant, but he wanted him to feel the pain, to get through the wreck that was left of him to whatever scrap of the boy still lingered there.

 

Hiccup’s eyes rolled in his head.  As Viggo began to fuck him, short, sharp thrusts that felt good for no one, he found himself grabbing Hiccup’s face again, trying to turn those wandering eyes to himself, but there was no directing that gaze.  

 

“Look at me.” he growled, fingers digging into Hiccup’s bruised and swollen jaw.  The boy began to make a strangled choking sound, eyes rolling back in his head, and it took Viggo a moment to realize he was choking.  On his own saliva.

 

The sight was appalling.  Almost reflexively he shook the boy, and the sound became a whooping gasp, then, after a moment, a hollow, bleating, inhuman wail as every thrust made the body move reflexively.  Feeling oddly detached, he grabbed Hiccup’s face roughly and began pulling off the bandages, all of which had been wrapped to so carefully conceal the damage.  His head blossomed like a rose as it moved up, the colorful bruising becoming red, swollen, pussing tissue clinging around a shaven skull that no longer held it’s shape.  

 

Viggo would never have identified him at a glance.  The hair, the eyes, the defiant expression, everything that made the boy HIM was gone now, leaving this hideous, wailing thing.  Maybe the boy’s father would have recognized him, but from the slope of his collar, his leg.  He cupped the boy’s face, his drool covered, bleating face, his fingers digging in to the hot, sticky softness that began at his left temple.  He felt the clotted puss seep uncomfortably against his fingers and only tightened his hold, causing the boy to jerk and arch, eyes wide, and for the briefest moment it seemed that his gaze flicked across Viggo’s features.

 

“Look at me.” he ordered again, teeth grit, as his fingers began to push into the stitch work the surgeon had done, pushing apart the infected skin that had not even begun to heal.  The boy went silent, back arched and mouth open in a shocked expression, jerking and trembling as Viggo moved inside him.  His eyes slid askew and stared up past him, though, still refusing to look him in the eye and acknowledge that he had been bested.  

 

Ryker had heard the wailing from on deck, and from the looks the men were starting to give him it was clear he should probably go do something about it.  He’d been wanting to finish the boy off ever since they’d pulled him out of the water, but Viggo had other ideas.  He’d always had a hard time letting things go.  If he was going to get rid of the annoying little shit now as well he’d have to do it without Viggo knowing, regardless of what his brother said.

 

He opened the door unannounced, ready to make the kid be quiet one way or another, and stopped cold in the doorway.  The boy was on the bed where they’d left him, eyes rolled up and rocking back and forth bonelessly.  His brother was on top of him, buried in the boy’s ass with his fingers sunk deep into the corpse’s soft head.  He saw why the boy had gone suddenly silent.  

 

It felt like he’d stood there gawking at the scene for ages, but was really only a few seconds, before Viggo’s head snapped up to look at him, expression twisted down furiously.

 

“What.” he demanded, almost growling.  He didn’t stop moving, though.  

 

Ryker found he couldn’t look away from the boy’s lolling head.  He blinked at them.  “Nothing.”  He quietly closed the door behind him and began to walk back onto deck, expression blank as he rejoined the crew.

 

The ports of home glittered in the fading light, lanterns and cookfires flaring into life across the bust coastline.  From deck they could just make out the man who waved them in with torches, and as the ships of the dragonhunter armada began to line up at the dock sailors began to jump the distance to the boards, too excited by the proximity to house, wife, and child to bother with the plank just yet.

 

The brothers watched from on deck, Viggo a small slip of a man next to his enormous brother.  Next would come unloading the goods to the warehouse and notifying the distributors, and after that…

 

“Did you get rid of it?” Ryker asked vaguely, the first words he’d spoken to Viggo since they’d spotted home on the horizon.

 

Viggo gave him an incredulous look.  “I’m sure I have no idea what you mean, brother.” he said, adjusting his hem before folding his hands behind his back.  Viggo might be able to fool customers, suppliers, hunters, even their father, but he had never been able to bluff Ryker.  Not that Ryker would ever tell him that.

 

Ryker leaned in so the men left on deck couldn’t hear them.  “You should get rid of it.” he said simply.

 

Viggo flared, glaring at him, but said nothing.  The men seemed to buy his story about the escaped nightterror that drowned in the bilge water, but anyone with a nose could tell that smell wasn’t coming from the bilge.  Besides, whether Viggo admitted it or not, a drowned dragon and a human corpse did not smell the same, and the men had encountered enough of both to know better.

 

Ryker began to walk away from his brother, pointing to the men “Alright, get your mangy asses down below so we can start unloading, we all want to get on home!” he shouted, herding the grumbling men away.

 

The flies began at the door.  Viggo stood a moment, hand on the ornate silver handle of his chamber.  While Ryker slept with the crew, Viggo had always insisted upon a private room that could be secured.  Ryker handled his paranoia by being scarier than whatever wants to kill him; Viggo handled his by locks, booby traps, and secreted weapons.  Both methods were successful to some degree, but Viggo assumed his let him sleep better at night.  An incorrect assumption, if he was ever honest with himself.

 

These past two weeks had been probably the best he’d slept in years.

 

Viggo pushed open the door to his chamber, the heavy stink of perfume and decay rolling out onto the deck, but he didn’t blink.  He simply closed the door behind him, the room an unbelievable buzz of flies as they hovered around the bed, where a figure was still curled up under the blankets, carefully arranged so the broken side of his head faced downward, giving the illusion he could be asleep.  Or at least, it had for the first few days.  Soon the skin had begun to split and waste away, and from the time he left him in the morning to when he came back to sleep at night white larvae would appear in the wounds.

 

He’d been taking good care of him.  Every morning and every night he’d washed the maggots from Hiccup’s flesh and doused him in the cheap perfume he’d bought from a passing merchant. The boy’s skin was becoming thin and leathery from repeated dousing.  He supposed if he went on long enough in this fashion the boy would mummify and the flies would no longer be a concern.

 

Viggo lightly ran his fingers down the boney prominence of Hiccup’s shoulder, disrupting the insects.  His face and his chest were still relatively intact, and a blanket had been pulled up over his waist to hide the wasting of his lower half.  The boy’s anus had gone soft and ruptured from what should have been light activity, and within days the flies and eaten out the wound and begun to expose the bones of his pelvis.  Over time rigor mortis had faded and he had been able to pry the mouth apart, and his new nightly routine hadn’t been much interrupted.

 

Viggo sighed wistfully and sat down on the edge of the bed, putting his head in his hands.  He could rightly call one of the men to take care of this, and they would,, but they would know.  His failures were not for public display.  Viggo supposed he’d have to wrap him in the blankets and wait for the ship to empty out.  He couldn’t throw him overboard when they were IN the port, meaning he either had to row out to sea and knock him over the side or bury him somewhere in town.  

 

...In fact, that might not be such a bad idea.  If he buried the body on his own property he wouldn’t have to worry about dogs or children digging it up, and Hiccup would never be too far.  There was even that boy down in the brig (Viggo had almost forgotten about him) that would probably need taken care of.  He could convince the boy to dig and then push him into the oubliette afterwards.  It wasn’t deep enough to kill him, but it would likely break his limbs, and then he would be no match for Ozzy.  Assuming Ozzy was still alive.  When he’d looked down the grate before leaving for this hunting trip he’d seen those green eyes staring up at him, the only thing human of the filthy, gibbering man.  Viggo wasn’t sure how he was surviving beyond the obvious, and suspected the dragonrider would get to find out first hand.

 

He gently stroked the shaven scalp of the boy, fingers wandering down to gently pry open his jaw.  His mouth dropped open, sticky strands of old come joining the top and bottom, and Viggo pushed a finger in to clear it.  There was no reason he couldn’t take the time to say goodbye properly.  He kissed the soft bottom lip and let his hand wander down to his own trousers.  Hiccup would be taking one more ride.

 

The sun had set, he could see that much from the light that used to come through the grating.  For two weeks the sun had rose, and one wave of men moved into the sleeping quarters while another one moved out.  At sunset they changed positions, except tonight, when they’d watched the night shift rise and hurry out, and heard a great deal of noise from elsewhere in the ship, followed by...nothing.  It was the quietest he’d ever heard it.

 

Ruff had taken up her position in the corner, leaned back into the angle with her arms crossed, expression blank.  Tuff paced his tight, slow circle in the confines of the cell.  It was a narrow, dark little room that you could only lay down in if you layed corner to corner, and could only stand if you hunched that extra inch.  The one wall Viggo hadn’t lined with gronkle iron was an iron gate that only gave enough room to put your fingers through.

 

They’d been all over that door, working on the hinges and testing for weaknesses, but two weeks of struggle had convinced Tuff that it was impossible to break through.  He’d expected Ruff to come up with some brilliant plan to distract the guards (or if worse came to worst flash them while he grabbed the keys) but the dragon hunters rarely came close enough for that.  The only one who even came close enough to talk to was the man who brought them food and water on an intermittant basis.  Despite all attempts to bribe or distract him though he responded as though the twins weren’t even there.

 

In the silence of the boat he could hear someone’s footsteps, and tracked the sound as it slowly moved down the steps into the hold.  He had not anticipated that Viggo would be the one to come into view in the dark.

 

“Are you enjoying your stay?” the man asked, face unreadable but scrutinizing Tuff closely.  “I trust the accommodations have been satisfactory?”

 

Tuff shrugged.  “Yeah, I mean, at first I was like how many fleas are TOO many fleas, but when I found the chiggers on my back I was like yeah, chiggers too??  Not to mention the crabs.  That was a true work of artistry.  Pubic crabs.” he said, absently scratching himself through his trousers.  “You truly do give your guests everything.”

 

The brief disgusted expression that crossed Viggo’s face was enough to let him know it was working.  

 

“Anyway, if I have any complaints, it’d have to be atmosphere.” Tuff rambled, watching the man listen.  Viggo looked distracted, pulling a keyring from his pocket and counting down to the right cell key.  “I mean, yeah, it’s got bugs, and mold, and rats, and that’s just in the food, but it’s missing something, a certain je ne sais quoi, if you know what I mean.  I was thinking, and bear with me on this one, you could have the guards carry like big knobbly clubs and they like threaten you with them all the time like RAWR and I’d be all like ’Eh no don’t hurt me!’” he said mocking beastly rage and pathetic cowering

 

All the man did was go “hm” at him and begin to unlock the cell door, but before the tumblers clicked, thus allowing Tuff to burst it open, slam it into Viggo’s hound dog face, and make a run for it, he paused.

 

“I need your help with Hiccup.” Viggo said, looking into Tuff with an uncomfortably even gaze.  

 

Startled, Tuff blinked at him.  “Hiccup?”  

 

Last he’d seen him it had been over a month ago, when the dragon hunters shot them down.  From what Tuff had seen of him on the deck it hadn’t looked good.

 

“Yes.  Hiccup.  If you’d be so kind as to follow me.” he said turning the key.  The locked clicked and Tuff glanced back at his sister, who had slowly stood against the wall, and the two shrugged at each other.  It didn’t seem likely that it would be a trap; why bother laying a trap when the target was already at your mercy?  Of course, that didn’t mean Viggo didn’t have dastardly plans in the works, but the only way to find out would be to play along.

 

“Yeah.  Alright.” Tuffnut said, stepping out of the cell.

 

He’d known something was wrong as soon as they got close enough for the stench to meet them.  He’d been smelling something during the day lately, when the sun was hot and the ship sat listlessly on a glassy sea.  He’d assumed it was the latrine, unaware of how waste was handled on a ship this size, but he couldn’t make himself believe it anymore when he saw the flies beating their bodies uselessly against the wooden door.  What was inside that room was not just shit.  He covered his nose with the collar of his shirt as a stinking, hot wave of air crashed over them, making his eyes burn and his stomach twist.

 

The room was fairly simple, just a table and chair, a clothes cupboard, a basin and pitcher on a small stand, and a bed.  The bed was narrow and unmade.  There was something staining all the sheets, and in the middle of it….

 

In the middle of it…

 

Viggo walked past the stunned boy and laid an affectionate hand on the corpse’s waist.  The thing was nude and putrid, crawling with little white maggots, and lay with its face down in the stained blankets.  Something was going on with the ass that Tuff refused to look closer at, and its legs hung limply over the side of the bed.  One of the legs was missing below the knee.  The metal prosthetic was still strapped onto it, remarkably clean considering what else was going on.

 

Tuff took an instinctive step back, but his back met the closed door.  Viggo wasn’t talking.  He scanned him desperately, trying to get a read on what he was thinking, but that uncomfortable blank expression and silence gave him nothing at all to work with.

 

“Wrap him up in the blankets.” he said finally, giving an order.  “You’ll stitch him a shroud, and then you’re going to dig.”

 

The port was never silent.  Though it was late at night by the time they disembarked the pubs and inns were lamplit and spilled music out into the streets.  Outside their cheerful, well lit radius the night was black, and the only thing to see was Viggo’s hooded lantern casting a circle of light on the cobblestone streets.  Tuff found himself completely lost in the dark within minutes, and realized he couldn’t run if he wanted to, even if he knew which way was shore.

 

He was doing everything in his power not to pay attention to the thing draped over his shoulder.  Wrapped in layers of wool he could still feel something cold seeping against his shoulder, and though the flies seemed to have fled the same could not be true of the smell.  Ruff was walking behind him, giving a running commentary on anything and everything they came across.  The constant, even chatter distracted him from the uncomfortable softness of his burden.  

 

Eventually he had to stand, puffing, while Viggo opened a gate.  The ground changed to stepping stones, then dirt as they moved forward in the hot night.  Abruptly Viggo stopped dead, putting a hand against Tuff’s chest to stop him.

 

The beam of the lantern flashed across plants and stone before settling on a mossy patch of earth.  Tuff stared at it, uncomprehending.

 

“Here.”  Viggo said after a moment, tone oddly crisp.  “You’ll dig here.  Put him down.”

 

Tuff dropped the carcass roughly, exhausted by the weight of it and the heat, and felt an immediate flash of guilt.  The shrouded body lay in a crumpled heap on the moss, boneless, and he began trying to compose what he would say about all this to Stoik is his head.

 

His reverie was interrupted when the light disappeared, swerving away abruptly and dancing off down the grass as Viggo walked away.  He was standing in utter darkness, the moon having set sometime before, in an unknown environment, the corpse of his friend at his feet and the man who had killed (and then ------) said friend moving somewhere off in the dark doing Thor knew what.  The wave of panic that rocked through Tuffnut rooted him to the spot, guts watery and legs weak, and he heard the make shift shroud begin to rustle at his feet as the body inside it began to move.

 

There was an enormous screech of metal somewhere out in the dark, followed by a metallic crash, like a gate slamming home, and then the circle of light began bouncing its way back towards him.  The light leapt across the shrouded corpse, still laying exactly where it had been when he dropped it, and dashed up his body, pausing on his face and blinding him.  Tuff cursed and shielded his eyes, seeing spots, and something long and metal was thrown down in the dirt at his feet.

 

“Dig.” Viggo ordered, and Tuff scrubbed at his eyes, heart hammering but appearing unbothered.

 

Somewhere in the dark he heard “Maybe you should just do it.”  His sister sounded genuinely worried, but not afraid.  He shut his eyes against the light and squat, feeling around hesitantly for whatever Viggo had thrown.  He found the shroud first and yanked his hand back, swallowing and trying again further away.  He finally found a wooden handle, and ghosted his hands over it, feeling out the dimensions.  It was a shovel, pointed and clean.

 

“Y-you know, Hiccup and I used to talk about it a lot, and what he always told me was that he wanted to be buried in an active volcano and the funeral--”

 

“I said dig.” Came Viggo’s voice again, quiet and enunciated, and the soft tone somehow carried more threat than if he had shouted it.  Tuff’s mouth closed and he wrapped his fingers around the handle of the shovel, slowly starting to lift it.

 

His intentions must have shown on his face, because the light vanished entirely from the landscape.  Viggo had pulled the visor around to completely conceal the flame.  He stumbled, feeling a moment of strange vertigo before his vision cleared enough to see the faint pinpricks of light that were the stars above, and he again knew which way was up.  A little too late, unfortunately, as something metal cracked down over his skull, sending everything ringing.  He shouted and went to his knees, putting a hand over his head.

 

When Viggo finally spoke again, it was barely above a whisper.  “Dig in the dark then.”

 

Digging a grave was a difficult task during daylight hours, but in the night, in the dark, between his friend’s body and his murderer, it felt like a Sisyphean task.  Dirt and rocks went to the left, near what he thought was Viggo.  The shovel bit weakly at the dry ground and made scattered progress, and his head pounded and throbbed in his ears.  He’d always bragged about his hard skull, but it had been mostly talk, and he was almost certain that wasn’t just sweat dripping down his forehead.

 

Two feet was a shallow grave, but it was also the most that Tuff could do.  Instead of lifting the heat the night had just made it muggy, and he had to sit down on the edge of the grave, sweating and panting.  

 

Under orders he stood and grabbed the edge of the shroud, dragging the body towards the hole.  It fell in with an awful, soft plop and Tuff scrambled out of the hole as fast as he could, scrabbling a few yards away in the dark and sitting on the ground, panting.  The light hadn’t come on, and neither Viggo nor his sister had spoken.  He could hear the sound of a dog barking somewhere off in the dark.

 

Viggo couldn’t know his exact location.  Maybe if he ran he’d get lucky.  Except he somehow couldn’t leave Hiccup crumpled into an open grave like that, even if the monstrous corpse was his friend only in association to Hiccup.  He shakily got to his feet and felt his way back to the edge of the grave, stopping a moment to breathe before putting his hands in and patting along the dirty shroud for Hiccup’s limbs.  He eventually found his shoulders and grabbed onto them, pulling his friend straight in his grave.  “Sorry.” he panted, voice trembling.  “I’m sorry.”  

 

The filling was easier than the digging.  Tuffnut patted the dirt down with his blistered palms, gathering the stones he’d dug up and mounding them as best he could by feel.  It was a pathetic monument that a kick could scatter.  Finally he stood, dirty and legs trembling, and waiting for Viggo to order him to dig a second grave.

 

Instead the hood was slowly pulled back from the lantern, a crescent like the moon splashed across the ground that slowly grew to full.  The grave was a messy area of disturbed earth, context unknown, with a tiny group of small stones on it that may have just been accidental.  His tired heart gave a distressed ache but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from the light.

 

Suddenly it darted off as Viggo aimed it across the yard.  It settled on what appeared to be a stone wall, with a door set into it, some ten yards away.  “Put the shovel back.” he heard Viggo’s voice say.

 

There was nothing else to do.  It was easy to convince himself to walk towards the light, shovel held out in front of him to encounter any obstacles, but he was not where he should have been looking.  He felt his step come down on stone, and then the next step came down on nothing at all.  He shouted and fell forward, slamming chin first into the other side of whatever this was before falling through.  A quick thinker, he held onto the shovel and it jammed near the surface, longer than the hole was wide, leaving him dangling precariously by one arm.  He lunged and managed to grab it with his other hand, legs windmilling uselessly in the empty air.

 

He heard footsteps above, struggling to keep his grip, and was suddenly dazzled by the bright lantern aimed directly down the hole.  He quickly looked down, and through the spots in his vision he could see he was dangling in a stone shaft which widened at the bottom.  His shadow loomed over what was below him, and the impression of bottomlessness did nothing to calm him.  He struggled to pull himself up, but his arms were tired from digging and he couldn’t hold his grip.

 

His sister’s voice.  “It’ll be okay!” she called down.  “I’m not gonna let anything happen to you!  Now let go before he makes you, it’ll be fine!”

 

He gaped up towards the light, expecting a silhouette, but it was still just the lantern.  It moved, and he felt fingers touch his own.

 

Tuff mentally shot off a quick prayer to Loki and let go of the shovel.  

 

 


	2. Oubliette

Inside the oubliette, there was nothing but darkness.  Tuff tried to shift his legs, letting out a shrill cry he’d never have admitted to as the right one stayed caught.  Whatever he’d landed on hadn’t been stone, but something wet and slick, hard, but brittle.  The (sticks?) had shattered under his weight and he felt himself lying in a jagged bed.  The pain of impact had been awesome, his legs and spine nothing but watery and hot pools of agony. 

His leg, something was very wrong with his leg. 

He tried to sit up, feeling around him in the dark over the wet (branches?) and finding something sharp in the air above his shin.  He whined and touched it again, terrified to find that the stick (or was it his own shinbone?) came right out from the skin below the knee.  He felt across the back of his leg and confirmed it was not his bone, but something spearing in from underneath, entering just beside his Achilles tendon and running through the muscle. 

The light had disappeared from the mouth of the pit, and it took Tuff a moment to realize Viggo had left him alone. 

He wailed up the shaft to his sister, and though he couldn’t see anything he heard her move up above. “Are you okay?” she called down.

“My leg is really broken!” he called up, voice a little high and flirting with the edges of hysteria. 

He heard the metal bang and clang.  “He locked it!  I’ll see what I can do!”

Tuff laid back gingerly on the horrible bed, trying to get his breath and his senses.  The smell down here was terrible, something hot and rotting and wet, and Tuff thought maybe Viggo had just tricked him into falling into an open latrine, or a sewer grate.  If this really was shit down here he needed to find a way to patch up and clean the wound before it started rotting.  An exit would be a plus, too.

He managed to calm himself enough to sit up again, breathing shakily as he reached his fingers out and began to hesitantly feel out the dark.  Behind him there was a slick stone wall, wet with water seepage, enough to damped his fingers and maybe lick if he got desperate.  The wall seemed gently curved, and if it continued into a circle he thought the pit was no wider than ten feet across from end to end.  It curved away out of reach and Tuffnut turned his attention to what he was laying on.  If it was branches or sticks maybe he could tie them together into a ladder and get out that way.  He couldn’t wait for Ruff to get him out this time.  Ruff had died from inhaling chlorine gas nearly a month ago now, and what was waiting up above for him would never be able to let down a rope.

The sticks didn’t feel right.  He lifted one in his hand, feeling the rough surface and gentle curve of it, more like a bow than a twig.  More like a rib, actually.  He made himself drop it and kept feeling along, finding something smooth and round.  This was definitely not wood.  He picked it up in his hands and held it a moment, fingers seeking out the teeth and orbitals he knew would be there.

Tuff dropped the skull with a shout of disgust, heart hammering.  It clattered against the bones and stopped near his foot.  Somewhere in the echoing dark something else moved, just a little, and Tuff froze, listening hard.  He’d originally thought the pit was silent, but there was a sound, something soft and rhythmic, like…breathing.  He swallowed.  “H-hello?”

Suddenly things began to happen very fast.  Something clamped down around Tuff’s ruined ankle, some large wet hand that squeezed hard and sent a wave of nauseous pain up him.  He screamed and lashed out, smashing the skull into…whatever it was.  He heard a grunt from something much larger than him and tried to scramble up, leg a pillar of agony but willing to run on it if it meant not being eaten by whatever that was.  The hand hauled him back and he felt two very human arms wrap around him, holding him tightly while the massive head, bushy and matted, lowered and began to sniff at his throat. Tuff wailed and jammed the heel of his hand into the thing’s nose.

This time it jerked back slightly, and Tuff twisted in its grip and starting hitting anything he could get ahold of.  The startled arms loosened and he slipped out from them, trying to run on the broken terrain, but he slipped almost immediately and the thing grabbed his leg again.  He felt square, blunt teeth clamp down on his injured leg and begin to tear.

His screaming had to be audible back in town.  He grabbed blindly at the bone pile and began to bludgeon the thing with any piece he could find, eventually finding a thigh bone and the things skull.  Huffing, the thing pulled away, but it took the mouthful of gnawed thigh with it. 

Tuff scrambled frantically around the perimeter of the pit, feeling the walls for exits, but it was a smooth fitted wall with no mortar to dig out.  The thing moved again behind him and he screamed at it as his fingers found what felt like grooves worn in to the top of the rocks.   It was just enough for a handhold, and he hauled himself up, feeling around for more.  To his surprise, the grooves had been carved into every rock in a row, forming almost a ladder.  He crawled up it as fast as he could, panting and shaking, and he heard the thing come to the bottom of the ladder.  It was following him up. 

The carved grooves stopped abruptly and Tuff’s fingers flailed against the smooth surface. He could hear whatever it was behind him.  At the top of his reach the wall abruptly curved inward, apparently sloping quite some distance until it reached the entrance.  Probably to prevent this exact escape attempt.

The thing touched his leg again and he panicked, grabbing the narrow groove by his nails and kicking as hard as he could at the pursuer with his injured leg.  He may as well have been kicking at a stone, for all it seemed to feel it. 

Unwilling to die here, he took a desperate chance and let the man begin to climb, hands grabbing at his legs and torso as the man crawled up to grab at him.  He pushed back, forcing the man to hold on tight to the wall, then scrabbled up him like a lemur, planting a foot on the things horrible, human head and making a desperate leap for what he hoped was the entrance.

Time seemed to stall, Tuff moving through the darkness like there was nothing in the universe, when suddenly his fingertips touched wood.  He shouted and grabbed for it, fingers closing around the handle of the shovel and barely holding on when his weight fell on his shoulder. 

Dangling, adrenaline gave him the power to grab ahold with the other hand and begin hauling himself up.  With great strain he managed to get his chin above the jammed shovel and held on for dear life.  Just above he could hear the soft sounds of night insects in the grass.  He had to be close to the mouth of the pit.  He pulled his legs up to him as best he could and risked putting an arm out blindly above him.  His fingers touched cold, rusted metal, and for a brief moment he thought he was out.  He pushed as hard as he dared, with nothing but this jammed shovel holding his weight, but the grate on top of the pit had been lowered and locked.  It wasn’t going to budge.

Below, he heard the thing babble something that almost sounded like words before the slip and crunch of it dropping back down to the pit.  He heard it moving down there somewhere.  He hoped it wasn’t coming up with a plan to get up here.

Exhausted, Tuff pulled himself carefully on top of the jammed shovel and stretched out, balancing precariously.  He wrapped his arms around the handle clung there, shivering and pained, through the night.

 

The lantern in front of Viggo’s house had been lit.  For a moment he flared at the gall of someone coming in like that, but when he stomped through the door to curse them out he found a plate of butter cookies sitting neatly in the center of his dusty kitchen table.  He stared at it, paranoia looking around him for any traps.  The only person who knew he liked butter cookies was his mother (and Ryker, but he would never do such a thing)  He edged closer and gave the plate a jab, checking to see if it was booby trapped.  It wasn’t.  He next picked one up and examined it closely.  It looked like one of his mother’s cookies.  It smelled alright.  He put it back on the plate and stood, eyeing them suspiciously, before making his decision and grabbing it back, taking a tentative bite.

It was exactly the way he remembered it.  The cookie was warm, buttery, soft and perfect.  He relaxed, sighing happily as he put the rest of it in his mouth and chewed.  She must have heard the ship had come in and stopped by to see him, but he was still on the ship waiting for the men to clear out.  He grabbed another one and was raising it to his mouth when he heard his brother’s voice.

“I told her not to come in,” he said, and Viggo snapped his head to the sound, surprised his brother had managed to sneak up on him like that.  Ryker was standing in the doorframe, arms crossed and looking ever so smug about something.  Viggo narrowed his eyes, glaring as best he could with a full mouth and cookie crumbs in his goatee.

Ryker crossed the short distance to the table and took one of the cookies, mostly to see the irritation that flashed across his brother’s face.  “She asked me if you put on any weight and I told her no.  So now she’s feeding you cookies.  You can thank me later.” He said, putting it in his mouth.  He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, watching Viggo glare at him.  The men seemed to find that glare intimidating, but to Ryker it always looked like a child one push away from having a tantrum.  He’d been proud of his ability to make Viggo have full fledged tantruming meltdowns all the way until he was 16, and ever since neither one has forgotten it. 

“So.” He said casually, clearly getting to the point.  “You took care of it?”

Viggo primly brushed crumbs off his chest, though he missed the ones in his beard.  “There’s nothing to take care of.  I do wish you’d stop going on about this nonsense, big brother.”

Ryker snorted.  “So yes?  You didn’t feed him to Ozzy, did you?  I saw the light out back a while ago.”

Viggo rolled his eyes, which combined with the petulant expression made him seem younger.  “No, I buried him out back.  I fed the other one to Ozzy.  He’s probably half chewed by now.”

Ryker nodded, then paused.  “Somebody feeding him when we’re away?”

“I assure you I have no idea.” Viggo said smoothly. 

He saw Ryker’s eyes flick down to his waist, where he had the boy’s prosthetic limb tucked in his belt for safe keeping. There was a spot of blood and a bit of blonde hair caught in the mechanism.  He didn’t say anything, fortunately, and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Mum wants to see you tomorrow.” Ryker said, moving to go.  “Come over to the house for breakfast, hn?”

He was walking past his brother, and at that petulant face just couldn’t resist reaching over and patting his cheek condescendingly.  If anything, it made him look even more constipated. 

 

There are certain boundaries that even brothers don’t cross, and telling their mother that he’d killed and fucked a teenage boy was apparently past the line, because when Viggo crossed into his mother’s yard in the early morning coolness she saw him out the window and immediately brightened.  He felt a strange, unspoken fear lift off him as she made it to the kitchen door and ran out to him, sending the yard chickens scattering.  She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him as hard as she could, almost lifting him off the ground.

“I’m pleased to see you as well, mother.” He managed, glad that no one else was out yet.  “I trust all is well?”

She didn’t answer.  In all honesty he hadn’t heard her say anything to anyone in almost fifteen years, since his father died, and he’d never been good at reading her expressions and gestures like Ryker was.  She pulled away after a moment and offered him a beaming smile, before taking his hand and pulling him towards the house.

He didn’t really like going home.  The cottage was warm and bright and cheery and always smelled like his mother’s cooking, and he fought a rising swell of anxiety as he stepped into the dawn rosy kitchen, where a tea kettle and skillet were already on the stove.  Ryker was sitting at the table, at the head seat, which technically was his by right since he’d never moved out of this place.  After their father died he always had some reason why it just didn’t make good sense to move out, especially when they weren’t home more than a week a month.

Ryker was smirking at him as he hesitantly lowered himself onto the little wooden stool that had been his seat at this table for the better part of thirty years.  He hated this spot.  He hated this table.  At his own house he didn’t even have seating for guests, just his own chair, since he wasn’t the sort of man to entertain visitors.  He offered his mother a strained smile as she poured a cup of tea for him and kissed him on the forehead.

Ryker saved him from the awkward silence, not that he was particularly grateful for the gesture.  “We did good business this month, Mum.” He said, knowing she was listening.  “We finally took care of those dragon riders that have been giving us trouble.  They aren’t going to be bothering anyone anymore, right Viggo?”

Viggo visibly flinched at his name, rather hoping to be left out of it. 

“Yes, they’ve …changed their priorities.” He lied, fidgeting with his hands. 

The woman just nodded and picked up a small basket, putting it on the table in front of Viggo.  He stared at it.

“That means she wants you to go get some eggs.” Ryker supplied, leaning in conspiratorially.

Viggo flared and snatched the basket.  “I know what it means.” He snapped, tone sharp despite himself.  He saw his mother look at him and he quickly stood, carrying the basket away into the yard.

The coop was out back, and he went inside it sullenly, glaring at the chickens still sitting in their boxes and daring one of them to peck him.  He’d put his hand under one too many brooding hens as a boy, and was still nervous of the speckled brown hens.  They eyed him warily as he walked down the rows, collecting the brown eggs from the straw. 

When he returned to the kitchen his mother was laughing.  Something Ryker had said apparently.  Expression blank, he set the basket down on the table, catching the slightly worried glint in Ryker’s expression.  He felt his irritation flare and glared down at the wood grain on the table, letting Ryker carry the one sided conversation.

She served them eggs on top of fried bread, and Viggo ate it silently, eyes blank and somehow exquisitely miserable as the familiar cooked meal went down his throat.  He barely chewed.  Ryker kept cheerfully chatting as though nothing was wrong, politely ignoring Viggo’s rudeness except to prompt him to bark ‘yes’ or ‘no’ now and then.  The pleasant meal had his heart pounding and eyes burning by the end of it, and he saw the look Ryker gave him as he quickly said his goodbyes and kissed her.  Viggo hurried down the street back to his house with his hands in his pockets and eyes on the cobbles.

 

The dawn had done little to help him.

Tuff had drifted in and out of a terrible doze, clinging to the shovel for dear life and listening for the sounds of the thing moving down in the pit below him.  The light relieved the horror of the dark but brought its own.  He couldn’t see anything but the pinkish blue sky through the metal grate, but the light shone on his body and let him see exactly how bad things had become.

His leg was not doing well.  The foreign bone that had jammed through his calf was stained and filthy, and the limb had stiffened up, skin hot and tight, and foot turning slightly purplish.  The bite the thing had taken out of his thigh was not much better, swollen and hot, with flies beginning to hover over the wounds.  He was completely covered in a filth he now suspected was the bodily waste and leftovers of whatever it was Viggo had down here.

That part was its own horror.  He’d tried to tell himself it was some exotic form of dragon, maybe even a monster, but as the dawn began to throw faint light down the shaft he was able to make out what he hung above.  The bottom of the pit was entirely buried in a thick layer of bone, packed solid with shit and a fetid soup that was forming from the seeping water.  Standing in the middle of it, staring up unblinkingly, was a vast, blackened, tangled thing that had to have once been a man.  His beard and hair had matted into an inhuman mane but the pearly white teeth and bright green eyes were purely man.  Tuff had tried calling down to him, but whoever it was wasn’t very interested in talking.  He’d only stared.

“You don’t have much to say, do you.” Tuff rambled, probably his fifth attempt to get the man talking.  He couldn’t have been down in this pit his whole life, could he?  “You know, there’s this lady I know who doesn’t talk much either, named Gothi?  Don’t suppose you two are related, huh?”

Nothing.  He got more reaction talking to a frog.

“Gothi’s the…the…well she fixes people up when they get hurt.  She’s one of the people I know back on Berk.  Do you know where Berk is?  In the archipelago?  Assuming we’re still somewhere in the vicinity of the archipelago?”  He coughed and shifted his grip on the shovel, glancing at the place where it dug into the stone worriedly.  It had slipped some during the night, leaving an inch-long scrape.

“Let’s see, who else do I know.” He tried.  “There’s Hiccup, he’s got one leg, tousled brown hair, big green eyes, totally the whole package if you don’t count the leg thing.  Then there’s Astrid, and Fishlegs,” he began counting off fingers.  “Snotlout, Gobber, and you know my sister, Ruff.” He gestured up to the empty air. “That’s just my friends on Berk.  The chief of the Berserkers, Dagur?  Him and his sister Heather, we’re really tight, really solid friendship, would totally hit that if I didn’t think he could kill me.  And he could totally kill me.” Tuff added, shrugging.  “Heather could, too, but Dagur’s probably do it all big and scary and like strangle me to death with his bare hands.”  He paused.  “Kind of hot.”

Below him the green eyes had narrowed slightly.

“What are you reacting to, the strangling to death or the part where I think it’s kind of hot?” he asked.

To his surprise the eyes turned away and the man moved slowly out of the light, disappearing into the widened base that wasn’t visible from here up top.  He didn’t know if that was better or worse.

“Helloooo.” He called down, sing song.  “Are you like hiding and hoping I come down so you can eat some more of my leg?  Because you already got a piece.”

There was no response.  Tuff tried to crane his neck to see where the man had gone, but the angle of the shaft didn’t permit it.

“I’m just gonna stay up here and...you know…starve to death.” He said, knowing starvation probably was the least of his worries.  “I’ll just dangle, like a carrot on a string, and you can’t get me.  So nyah.”

He heard a sound above him, and he went still, listening carefully.  The face that appeared over the pit was not what he was hoping for. 

Viggo. 

The man already looked pissed, like he’d woken up to find the dog had puked on his bed in the night.  His hands were held tightly behind his back and his mouth was a thin line of irritation.

“Hey.” Tuff called up, sounding casual.  “How’s it hanging?”

He saw Viggo narrow his eyes slightly.

“So uh, is there like a continental breakfast, or…” he trailed off.

Viggo snorted at him and the shape disappeared.  He heard footsteps on the earth again, and resisted the urge to call him back.

 

As the sun rose higher in the sky it began to shine directly down the shaft, and the August heat began to cook the shit filled pit below him.  The fumes and flies were enough to make him dizzy, and he locked his arms around the shovel, hugging it dearly and refusing to let go.  As the day carried on to noon he threw up something thin and yellowish, limbs stiff and swollen, and found himself slipping away now and then.  The flies had begun to swarm the bloodied, infected leg and he had given up shooing them off.  He knew they’d fill his leg with maggots and he also knew maggots only ate the dead and infected tissue, so it might just work out in his favor.

In the afternoon he stopped sweating, and his parched, dry lips began to crack.  He licked at them uselessly and tried to whistle, managing a rough, reedy tune.  When that gave out he started singing, anything he could think of, and by evening he was belting drinking songs at the top of his voice, throat getting more and more ragged with each chorus

He was practically screaming a verse about the innkeeper’s daughter, laying on his back on the shovel and eyes closed against the sun, when a shadow was cast over his face.  He opened his eyes quickly and saw Viggo standing over the pit again, expression now mostly baffled.  Tuff met his eyes.

“Got any requests?”

Viggo blinked at him, and after a moment Tuff resumed singing.

No one moved for some time, and the heat and infection made it hard to keep track of how long was passing.  Eventually he heard something scrape and clink against the metal grate, and his eyes flew open in time to see the rusted bars shriek on their hinges and swing open, crashing against the ground on the other side.  It was the exact same sound he’d heard last night and mistaken for Viggo closing the gate.

Tuff stared up, uncomprehending, as Viggo squatted by the side of the pit.  He was looking down at him with a keen interest he had never seen directed at him before.

“Well are you coming out or shall I close the grate again?” Viggo asked casually.

 

The boy sat slumped and askew at the kitchen table, watching blearily while Viggo moved silently about the kitchen.  The man poured a small amount of clear water in a mug and set it down in front of Tuff on the table.  Without pausing to think Tuff grabbed it and downed what was there, shaking the cup to get the last few drops into his mouth and then starting to lick the rim.  Viggo frowned and grabbed the cup, pouring in another scant inch of water.  When Tuff drained it this time he held it out hopefully, but Viggo made no move to give him any more.

After a moment the man pulled a plate with four cookies and some crumbs down from where it was hidden on a high shelf.  Tuff watched hungrily, stomach gnawing at itself, as Viggo took two of the cookies off the plate and set the plate down on the table, pushing it slowly towards him.

Tuff demolished the cookies in no time, tears stinging his eyes.  He licked the plate and inspected the table for any crumbs, eyes finally settling on the other two cookies.  Viggo was standing at the other side of the table, looking down at Tuff and breaking one of the cookies into pieces.  His expression was mostly vacant, like he was deep in thought, and Tuff licked his lips as he watched Viggo start to put the pieces in his mouth.  Tuff’s stomach was screaming at him to get more, but when pushing the plate across the table at Viggo got absolutely no response he felt himself shrinking a little.  The man ate the other two without offering or even speaking to Tuff.  Eventually the boy just flopped forward helplessly on the table, watching the food disappear.

Viggo offered nothing.  When the man had finished and was only staring at Tuff with an unsettling gaze he decided to risk it, and grabbed for the water pitcher, raising it over his head and chugging as fast as he could, expecting Viggo to rip it away from him.  There was nothing, though.  He felt dizzy as he set the heavy pitcher down.

Viggo leaned forward and placed a hand gently on Tuff’s hair.  Tuff’s eyes widened to saucers as he looked up at Viggo.  The man was staring back into him intently, some strange, burning thing inside him that made Tuff’s stomach feel weak. He swallowed his gorge and tried to look away, horrified that tears were starting to pour from his eyes again, but Viggo grabbed him roughly by the jaw, turning his face back and leaning in slowly.  For a moment Tuff had a perfect, feverish vision of the man biting down on his lip and lovingly ripping it off.  He hitched with panic as Viggo pressed his dry lips against Tuff’s.  His neatly trimmed goatee scraped against his face like a wire brush and his lips were thin and papery, and somehow cold.  He tried to recoil but Viggo held his face in place with a bruising grip, and he gave up with a low whine, leaning his belly into the table and gripping the edge with white fingers.

The kiss, frozen and almost sterile, lasted longer than Tuff was ready for.  He whined and began trying to pull away again, and this time Viggo let him, bringing a hand up to wipe his mouth on his sleeve.  Tuff cowered back into the chair and stared at him with wide eyes, trembling from more than just fever now.

Viggo’s eyes were wrong.  The way he was looking at him was the way he imagined it felt to be a girl at the tavern with a lot of leering drunks.  It wasn’t the expression that SHOULD be on Viggo’s face.

Viggo lunged and grabbed his collar, making Tuff start with a flail, but he didn’t have much leverage as Viggo pushed the chair back with him still inside it.  He hit the ground on his back hard, the chair back digging into his shoulder blades, and had no time to get his bearings before Viggo was sitting on top of his chest, knees tucked up under him oddly so as to put his full weight on Tuff’s ribcage.  Tuff wheezed a lungful of air out and tried to claw at him, but Viggo easily grabbed his wrists and pinned them above his head.

Something was wrong.  He pulled in a shallow, whooping breath, barely able to hold onto it before it rushed back out of him.  He began a panicked, rough, desperate panting.  “Please!” he managed to wheeze.  “Please, I can’t breathe!”

He saw Viggo’s lips curl up into a wicked grin and realized that that was exactly the point.  He struggled feebly against him, but the blood was pounding in his ears and the primal, screaming need to breathe was filling his every thought.  He forced a grin onto his face, matching Viggo’s own.

“Harder.” He mouthed, unable to quite get the breath to say it.

He saw Viggo’s eyes sharpen with interest as the world became distant and grey.

 


	3. Boxing Tuffnut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone else seen Boxing Helena? Anyone?

When Tuff’s eyes opened the world was tilting at the wrong angle.  His vision was dark and smudged and his ears were pulsing with the beat of his heart.

Something tugged at his hair and he groaned, trying to lift his face to look around. He was still in the kitchen, in the chair, though Viggo had righted it again.  His arms were pinned down at his side and he twisted his wrists, unsure what he’d been bound with.  The tug came again and something dropped heavily down onto his lap.  He looked down stupidly at the blonde dreadlock laying across his leg. 

A second had to fall before his brain realized what was happening and he jerked up, trying to pull his head away.  Viggo tightened his fist in Tuff’s locks and continued hacking at the mess with a pair of kitchen scissors.  He thrashed hard enough that his vision blacked and the point of the scissors butted against his temple, just hard enough to pierce the skin.  When he was forced to go still to wait for his head to clear Viggo calmly resumed cutting.

Snip.  Another lock fell like a braid of rope onto the floor.  Snip.  Tuff’s right ear was exposed now.  He hitched and made himself freeze, tears brimming in his eyes again as more braids fell to the ground.  Soon Viggo was snipping around his other ear, and as the last lock fell the tears spilled over.  Tuff hiccoughed and held his breath, not wanting to cry so openly in front of the man, but Viggo completely ignored it.  After a moment he brushed off Tuff’s shoulders and pressed a dry kiss to his temple.  “You’re looking more like yourself already.” He purred, and the tone made Tuff’s heart hammer. 

“W-what are you doing?” he managed, voice mostly steady.

“Just cleaning you up.” Viggo said cooly.  He began to comb out the remains of the locks, and Tuff hitched and turned his face down, humiliated.  Viggo’s fingers were gentle, though, and as the scissors came up again Tuff realized he wasn’t done.  The man began carefully snipping and trimming his hair, carding his fingers through it, and despite himself and his situation he felt oddly cared for.  He sniffled and sat still, waiting it out.

Blonde hairs covered Tuff’s clothes and the table.  Eventually the snipping slowed and stopped, and Viggo’s hands were carding unobstructed through his short hair.  Tuff sniffled and stared at the wood grain, tears spilling down his cheeks again.

Viggo’s fingers gently began to brush off his neck and shoulders.  He felt the man’s breath against the back of his neck and tensed, shivering, as Viggo blew the hairs off his neck.  It was followed by another light kiss.

“Stop.” He whined, despite himself.

Viggo only answered by slipping his fingers around Tuff’s neck, holding him still so he could kiss the spot again.  Tuff started trembling.

“Don’t be afraid.” Viggo murmured.  “You’re home now.”

Tuff strained against him.  “No I’m not!” he whined.  “I don’t live here, you whack job!  I belong back on Berk!  And you belong in an nuthouse!”

Viggo seemed to think about that one for a moment, then shrugged.  “No matter.  You’ll come to love it here.” He said, moving away from Tuff.  “And how is your leg?” he asked casually.

Tuff raised his head, looking up at him blearily.  “There’s a bone sticking through it.” He said, which he thought was pretty obvious.  “A shit covered bone.”

“Ah, yes.” Viggo said.  “But otherwise?”

Tuff stared at him.  “What do you mean, otherwise??  What else is there?” he paused, then added “It really hurts.  Isn’t there some law you have to give your POWs medical attention or something?”

“Yes, but you’re not a prisoner of war.”  He dried the plate and put it away.  “You’re my guest.  And don’t worry, you’ll be in surgery before the morning.”

Tuff’s expression crashed.  “Wait, surgery?”

“Of course.  How else would we do it?” he said, a slightly dreamy smile spreading across his face.  He crossed back over and patted Tuff affectionately on the thigh.  The infected bite throbbed and sent a bolt of silencing pain up Tuff’s side. “I’m going to take good care of you.” He purred.  “Don’t you worry, my dear Hiccup.  Everything is going to be alright.”

 

Viggo took the lantern to go draw more water, and Tuff found himself sitting alone in the kitchen.  Without the lantern he had only the faint light from the neighbor’s house coming through the window, and he strained against the ropes, trying to turn enough to get a good look.  If a light was on, it must mean someone was awake.

He took a few deep breaths to steady himself and began to rock the chair, trying to knock it over.  His leg was sending bolts of red warning pain into him but he tried to ignore it.  After the forth try the chair crashed down on its side and his swollen knee smacked against the stone floor, making him bellow despite himself. 

Shit.  Viggo had to have heard that.  He’d be coming back quickly, meaning he only had a few moments to make his escape.  He could barely think with his leg like this, and twisting enough to dislocate something would take too long.

He took a deep breath and began screaming at the top of his lungs. “HELP!  Somebody help me!” he shrieked, hoping the owner of that light was nearby.  “He’s killing me, help me, help me NOW!”

The door slammed open and Tuff screamed, Viggo standing in the frame with a look of anger on his face, lantern swinging wildly in the dark.  He stormed towards Tuff, grabbed the bone sticking out of his leg, and pulled. 

The scream could be heard from the docks. 

 

Things became fuzzy and out of sort for a while, the fever and pain pushing Tuff in and out of consciousness.  He knew he wasn’t tied anymore, and he’d been aware of Viggo’s hands, laying him out on some cold surface.  The cold edge of the kitchen scissors touching his stomach made him gasp and try to swat at him feebly, but Viggo easily caught his hands and put them back down at his sides, chiding him gently like a fussy child. The man couldn’t seem to stop talking.  As he cut Tuff’s clothes off he rambled meaninglessly about Maces and Talons, something involving the rules being in review by some committee, and there were few things on earth Tuff was able to care about less right now than Maces and Talons.  He could have sworn he heard him call him Hiccup again, though.  That couldn’t be right.

The water Viggo had brought to wash him with was cold, and as he began to scrub him with a sopping cloth he whined and tried to squirm away.  Unfortunately the man was skilled at redirecting Tuff’s efforts, and soon rolled him onto his back.  He ignored the infected leg completely, instead slopping cold water over Tuff’s back and ribs, making Tuff start to shiver.  He had enough presence of mind to yelp when Viggo began to matter of factly scrub at his ass and genitals, like THEY were the dirty part.

Eventually Viggo turned him back over, and Tuff was in too much pain to be concerned that he was naked in front of the man, or even that Viggo had touched him like that.  “Please, my leg.” He managed, voice wobbling. “I need to go to the doctor.”

“Already arranged.”  Viggo said.  “But first we have to clean you up.  You can’t have surgery looking like that, you’ll die of shock in no time.”

Tears were stinging at Tuff’s eyes again.  “I don’t want to have surgery.” He insisted. 

Viggo cooed over him and gently stroked his hair.  Despite everything, Tuff had to admit it was comforting.  “My dear boy, would I ever let anything happen to you?  You’ll have to learn to trust me.  I only want your well being and happiness.”

“Oh come on.” Tuff whined.  “don’t keep feeding me shit, we both know you did this in the first place.”

“Yes, well.”  Viggo mussed his hair and abandoned the conversation, as though it had been resolved somehow. 

Viggo lovingly dried him off, being almost gentle where it was sore, and stooped to pick Tuff up like a bride.  It was clearly a lot of weight for the man and he stumbled a bit as he carried him into another room, making Tuff cling to his neck in terror of being dropped.  His leg really wasn’t looking good.  Now that he could look at it it barely looked like a human limb, swollen and red, with white puss forming wherever the skin had broken.  The puss was moving a little.  Maggots.

His calf was splotched with an unhealthy color, and the foot had turned dusky and numb.  He hitched, having seen that color once before; when Gobber had finally agreed to lop off the mess that used to be Hiccup’s foot after the red death attacked.  Different foot, granted, but the color and that clinging smell didn’t lie.

The house wasn’t particularly large, despite Viggo’s income, mostly because he preferred to have a buffer of land between himself and his neighbors rather than a mansion.  A mansion would encourage visitors.  Instead he’d put his money into pet projects.  He carefully carried the boy to the small blank door in the kitchen, then forced him to cling to his neck while he opened it.

While the upstairs was rather simple and neat, the cellar was a whole other story.  The walls had been sealed to keep out the water, though it was still damp, and Viggo set him down on something metal as he went about lighting the gaslights.  The room was larger than the upstairs, and completely filled with clutter and machinery that had been organized in some way that made sense to him.  It reminded Tuff of Hiccup’s workshop, or at least the area near the forge did.  He stared at the man as he walked about, completely at home.

This was the most lively Tuff had ever seen Viggo’s expression, and that alone was enough to make him afraid.  This was a man who could watch a submaripper and a shellshocker duke it out and barely even crack a smile.  What the hell did he have to look so pleased about?

Viggo took his shoulders and gently, wordlessly, eased him back onto the table.  It was a long metal sheet with a gutter running around the outside and off the edge.  He didn’t have the strength left to fight him off as Viggo pulled his wrists above his head and tied them together with a leather strap that was bolted to the head of the table.  He struggled feebly as Viggo tightened straps across his chest and hip, and screamed when the man pulled his ruined leg straight and wrapped a restraint around the swollen ankle.  He gave his other leg similar treatment.

‘W-when is the doctor going to get here?” he asked, voice trembling and sounding a lot younger than 19.

Viggo didn’t answer him.  Instead the man was hunched over a basin nearby, pumping a little water into it and starting to scrub his hands.  Tuff hitched in terror, watching him wash his hands, then face, then systematically strip off his tunic and armor.  He was wearing only his trousers and boots when he turned back to face Tuff, grinning broadly and holding his hands up in front of him.

“I’m here!” he announced cheerfully. 

Tuff whined and tried to hide his face in his elbows, terrified and too feverish to think easily.  His eyes snapped back open when he felt fingers lightly ghosting up his good leg.  Viggo was standing beside the table, looking him over uncomfortably and tracing some line Tuff didn’t understand down his leg.  The touch made him shiver, and he whined.  “Y-you’re gonna knock me out first, right?” he asked anxiously.  He didn’t want to do this.  He REALLY didn’t want to do this.  But the color of his foot had him terrified, and he remembered all too clearly what had happened to Hiccup when Stoik had kept insisting they wait.  Hiccup’s fever had gotten so bad Stoik had ran with him into the ocean, and stood there in the night holding his head above water and blubbering. 

Viggo didn’t say anything to assuage his fears, instead nodding at the completion of his assessment and moving off into the room again.  Tuff strained to keep him in his vision, but he was moving somewhere behind shelves and crates, and he could hear the sound of metal brushing against metal.  When he returned he was carrying a metal tray, which he laid down on a small table near his head with a flourish.

Tuff craned his neck to see what was on the tray.  There were several small knives made of silver metal, more leather strapping, and a long serrated blade that looked like it might be some kind of hacksaw.

“W-wait!” Tuff hitched, twisting at his bonds.  “Wait, don’t!”

Viggo picked up one of the knives and examined it theatrically, letting Tuff see the steady gaslights reflected along the silver blade.  Carefully, he traced his fingertips from the tip of Tuff’s healthy foot to about halfway up the shin, stopping there and tracing a line across with his fingernail. 

“That’s the wrong leg!” Tuff screamed at him.  “That’s the wrong leg, you fucking idiot!”

Viggo lowered the scalpel.

 

The parts of it Tuff remembered were rough, jagged bits of time out of sequence.  There was never any sound but his own screaming and panting, and he remembered looking down dizzily at the table at one point and understanding why it had been built with gutters.  Despite the tourniquet the surface was slick with his blood, and he made himself stare up at the dark ceiling, unaware that that horrible bleating sound was himself.

He remembered Viggo reaching up to stroke his forehead soothingly, hand stained red.  He didn’t remember throwing up, and was not awake to see Viggo frantically untying him and rolling him over onto his stomach.  His leg did not roll with him, but stayed there on the table, pale and pink and perfect.

 

The dawn found Viggo sitting on his back steps, wearing only his trousers and dripping wet.  His hands were stained a dark brown color, fingers absently twirling a paring knife he’d picked up in the kitchen.  His yard was quiet.  Across town chickens were rising and beginning to crow, and women were starting to sweep out their houses.  In his yard, however, there was simply the wall, a few trees, and some scrubby brushes and grass.  He grew no garden, because who would tend it while he was away at sea?  It’s not as though he was ever going to marry a woman to keep his home.  No, it was fine here, just him and Ozzy out under that grating.

Well, and Hiccup.  He doubted the boy would be a permanent resident here.  The leg had gone about as well as could be expected, and it looked as though he’d cut it the perfect height for the prosthetic.  He’d sewn a flap of skin back over the stump to try to minimize healing time and infection, but the latter seemed almost a moot point.  The remaining leg was becoming gangrenous, and would likely kill him within a few days.  He supposed he could always take the other leg and call it a casualty of capture.  At this rate he would probably die of shock on the table.  He’d done that enough times to have learned better by now.

He flicked the paring knife at the dirt next to his foot and it stuck there, a hair from his right toe.  He’d never told anyone that at 9 he’d lost a game of mumbly peg with himself and pinned his foot to the dirt.  He liked to think he’d been convincing at playing that everything was fine over the next week, but in retrospect he was fairly certain he’d been walking funny and grinning too much.  He felt the usual creep of belated embarrassment and shame and sighed.  He hated spending time in port.  If it were up to him he’d spend every day out at sea, but Ryker was wholly insistent they stay at least every third week at home so he could keep an eye on Mum.  Thor knew why, the woman had been smiling and cleaning so damned cheerfully for fifteen years now, there was nothing wrong with her.  If anything she seemed even happier than before their father died.

His mind, ever ready to betray him, tried to replay the fantastic way he’d humiliated himself at his father’s funeral.  Ryker had been standing there, all stoic and plain faced, their mother standing next to him but not touching him, tears falling silently down her face.  In fact, other than the orator almost everyone was silent, leaving only the sounds of the ocean lapping at the darkened shoreline and Viggo hitching and bawling at the very, very back of the group.  He’d had his hands laced over his mouth, trying to muffle himself and giving paranoid looks to his father’s friends and assembled family, all of whom seemed to be looking at him with disgust and pity.  He’d been old enough not to do this, but it had been like a fountain and he couldn’t block the flow.  The muffled crying had been interrupted by Viggo abruptly vomiting into his hands, spraying the nearby mourners with regurgitated rum. 

He'd stood there, in a sudden silence as the orator paused, and every eye turned to him.  He met their collective gaze with utter terror, and bolted from the docks, missing over half the funeral.  No one had ever mentioned it to him again, but he knew that they knew.  His mother hadn’t spoken to him that night, or, it turned out, any night after.  She’d only smile at him, even if she was crying.  He’d been almost grown by then, he hadn’t needed her THAT much, but it still sat in his gut like a stone.

His brewing sulk was interrupted by someone knocking on the front door of his house.  He froze, turning an ear to the building and listening, and after a few moments it sounded again.  He had a visitor.

Swearing, Viggo climbed to his feet and moved to straighten his clothing, except he wasn’t wearing much.  If it was a business contact, or Thor forbid his mother (who was apparently ignoring his request not to come into his house now) he couldn’t open the door half naked and stained.  He padded to the front door and peeked through the viewer he’d built for the front door.  Through the small lens above the door he could see a slightly distorted image of his brother’s bald head and broad shoulders.

Pushing the viewer away he unbolted the door and threw it open, putting on his most murderous glare.  Ryker looked completely unimpressed, and only looked him up and down passively.  He was carrying a basket over one arm that he immediately recognized as his mother’s market basket.  His stomach rumbled, audibly, and his brother’s expression became a little smug. 

“Here.” He said, and thrust the basket at Viggo, who seized upon it with a little more eagerness than he intended to convey.  Ryker watched him start to rifle through it.  He’d been shoving food down Viggo’s throat for almost thirty five years, and knew well enough that, despite his brother’s claims to the contrary, the younger Grimborn never fed himself unless a meal was placed directly in front of him.  His first time working alone on a hunting vessel he’d come back thirty pounds lighter, and their mother had hounded him until he signed up with the same company, solely to steer Viggo towards the galley twice a day.

Honestly, he had more than a few questions about Viggo’s appearance, but he suspected that if he asked any he’d trigger Viggo to explain some new schematic or machine down in his cellar that he’d been up all night with, and he really did not have time to get drawn into that right now.   

He knew that when they were at home his brother still needed someone to put food in him and lock him in the bedroom sometimes until he fell asleep, but after two months away there were always a hundred little repairs needed at their mother’s house, and a garden that needed taming, wood that needed cut, and a million other things that he could really use some help from Viggo on, but Viggo was completely oblivious to the fact their mother was getting older and could no longer manage the household by herself.  If Viggo could at least find a better way to occupy himself while they were in town, maybe make a few friends so there would be someone else to keep an eye on him, it would make things a whole lot easier for Ryker.  He’d tried having those conversations with Viggo before, though, and Viggo always twisted it around to Ryker being the one who needed to get out more.  He never seemed to understand exactly why Ryker stayed living at home and giving their mother his income.

“Mum sent another batch of butter cookies, the rest is from me.” He said, pushing his way past Viggo into the kitchen.  There were towels on the kitchen floor, uncharacteristic of his tidy brother, but he ignored them and began setting the table for one.  When Viggo trailed him into the kitchen door he already had crumbs in his beard (the cookies had always been his mother’s secret weapon; the only thing they had ever found that Viggo would actually seek out and eat on his own.  He wasn’t sure Viggo ever figured out WHY their mother kept sending bags of cookies with him when they left for the sea. Knowing him he probably thought it was something insulting.)

Viggo unthinkingly let himself be directed into the chair and a plate of food put in front of him.  Ryker put the rest away on the shelves while Viggo ate, probably the first thing he’d properly eaten since they’d made port.

“I’ve got to go out and get some firewood for Mum today.  You need anything while I’m out?” Ryker asked neutrally.

Viggo made an annoyed sound around his fork.  “I’m not a child, you know.  I’m a fleet captain.  You don’t have to hover over me like this.”

Ryker sighed.  “Right.  Just try not to blow yourself up until I get back.” He said tiredly.

“That only happened once!” Viggo protested.

“Yeah, and I spent three days helping you put your bedroom back together.  And you didn’t even help cut all those planks, you just sat there playing with that weird wheel thing and smoking up the woods.”

Viggo dropped the fork.  “You know very well that was a combustion powered circular rotating saw and if I had not used the Sulphur I bought on sale the engine would not have exploded!”

“But it did.” Ryker shrugged.  “Making that…two explosions!  In two days.” He held out two fingers mockingly at Viggo.

“But none since then!” Viggo protested, voice getting a little shrill.

Ryker would never dare rile him up like this when they were out at sea.  If the dragon hunters saw their captain whining and stomping his foot they might have second thought about listening to Viggo’s plans, and Viggo’s plans were very much worth listening to.  Maybe a bit more complicated than he’d like, but the products were fantastic. 

Ryker flashed him the placating ‘I’m just joking’ grin and saw Viggo slouch back in his seat, crossing his arms testily.

“Mum wants to cook you dinner tonight.” He said, changing subjects as he moved towards the exit.  “Try not to cry this time.”

He knew Viggo well enough to duck, and the boiled egg he’d thrown flew right past him into the yard.

 

Tuff awoke in the dark cellar several times over the day.  He was too weak to struggle against the bonds, his entire awareness the dark red cacophony of pain that radiated from his lower half.  He couldn’t lift his head to see what Viggo had done, and in delirium tried to tell himself that everything was still okay.  He could still feel his legs, the right a pulsing wreckage and the left a circlet of fire around his shin.

Once he’d awoken and could clearly see the figure of his sister, sitting on a small stool next to the table.  When she saw him her mouth split into a wide, toothy grin.  “Hey bro.  Have you been losing weight?”

He shivered but rasped out “Yeah, a few pounds here and there.”

“Looks good.  Hiccup started a new trend.”

It barely made sense. He laughed anyway, the hoarse, raspy sound unsettling enough in the dark to make him wish he hadn’t.

 

The next time he woke up she was gone again, and Viggo was standing over him, the cellar well lit and humming with some kind of mechanism in the distance.

“Water!” Tuff rasped immediately, unable to think of anything else.  “I need water.”

Viggo looked up from where he was prodding Tuff’s infected leg with some kind of metal probe.  He was dressed this time, though in a white smock that looked uncharacteristic of him, and his hands were stained a dark color. 

Viggo seemed to ignore the request.  “The other leg is going.  I’m going to have to take it.”

The words took a moment to penetrate.  “W-what?  You just—“

“Brought you back to yourself, I know, dear boy, but I’m afraid it’s either the leg or your life.” He said, sounding almost apologetic.  “I do wish you hadn’t flown back for that little blonde girl I brought down.  I did try so hard for so long to end this feud peacefully, but for Hiccup Haddock it is all about vengeance, I see.”  He reached up and gently stroked Tuff’s sweat stained face.  “I’m so glad we’ve put all that nonsense behind us now.”

What?  Tuff twisted his wrists feebly in the bonds.  “I’m not Hiccup.  My name is Tuffnut.” He got out, the combination of confusion and fever bringing tears to his eyes.  “Tuffnut Thorston.”

Viggo shushed him, petting his forehead soothingly.  “Shh now, pet.  It’s only the fever.  When you wake up everything will be right as rain and you’ll be feeling just like your old self again.”

Tuff tried to buck against the leather straps, starting to panic.  “My name is Tuffnut Thorston!” he insisted.  “I’m not Hiccup, that’s not me!”

Viggo tsked and reached across to where a small, cracked shaving mirror was hung on the wall above the washbasin.  He brought it back and held in in front of Tuff’s face.

What he saw there didn’t make any sense.  It wasn’t him.  The boy in the mirror had short, tousled brown hair and sunken cheeks.  He also looked to be dying.  He glanced at Viggo’s fingers holding the mirror, stained a dark brown, and a sequence began to click in his head.  After the surgery Viggo must have stopped and taken the time to dye his hair, with him unconscious and bleeding.  He started to tremble.  “I’m not Hiccup.” He managed, voice shaking.

Viggo pulled the mirror up so he could look at it.  “Aren’t you?  That’s you, Hiccup Haddock.” He held the mirror in front of Tuffnut’s nose.  “Dragon rider and social activist, killing real human men to save the lives of animals.  It’s you.”

Tuff stammered out “H-hiccup has green eyes!”

That made Viggo frown.  He cupped Tuff’ face in his hands and gazed deeply into the boy’s eyes, and Tuff’s throat shut with terror.  The tips of Viggo’s thumbs lightly pressed against the bottom lid.  “Hn.  I suppose you might also have lost your eyes in that horrible accident that took your other leg.”

Tuff squeaked.  “Wait wait wait no!”

Viggo paused.  “Hiccup Haddock?” he asked pointedly, fingers still poised to gouge.

Tuff didn’t let himself nod.  “I’ll be Hiccup, I’ll be Hiccup!” he gasped, tears spilling out over Viggo’s fingers.  He pulled them back, looked at them, and oddly enough licked them clean.

“There’s a willing spirit.” He smirked.  “Now it’s too dangerous to do the surgery like this.  Shock would kill you faster than the infection.  But I’m willing to share something with you.”  He said that like it was a grand gesture. 

Tuff didn’t realize the man had moved away until his eyes snapped open to find him holding a tin box he’d never seen before.  “Did you ever stop to ask yourself why the dragon hunters were hunting dragons?”

The question seemed out of synch, and Tuff shook his head in confusion.  “Y-you said hides, and-and gronkle lava.”

Viggo nodded “And those are very important exports, but the most valuable part of the dragon is a small gland behind their right eye.  Only the size of a pea or so.” He held his fingertips a centimeter apart illustratively.  “One gland may be worth twice its weight in gold.  Do you know why?”

Clearly he wasn’t actually asking, just working out a speech, and Tuff was trapped in the role of straight-man.  He shook his head.

“Of course not.  This, my young Hiccup, is known as dragon tar, or just tar if it comes up in conversation.” He opened the box and pulled out a small glass jar, about the size of a spool of thread, and held it up to the light.  Its thick glass was filled with some black, sticky substance, that Tuff couldn’t identify.  “This jar is worth almost as much as one of my ships.  It’s made of razorwhips, high end but not as high as nightfury tar.  That is…unavailable at the moment.” He added.  He set the box down by Tuff’s hip and pulled out a strange little glass object that Tuff thought was a pipe.  He did something complicated with a gas burner and a small pick, taking his time. “One of the many praiseworthy qualities of tar is that it prevents shock.  It also blocks pain, hunger, fear, honestly everything that keeps a man from doing what needs to be done.”  He opened the jar and scooped a tiny amount onto the pick.  “Trust me. You won’t feel a thing.”

He rolled the pick in the pipe, breathing in deeply, but instead of pressing the pipe to Tuff’s lips he bent over the table and pressed their mouths together, waiting a moment while Tuff realized what he wanted and let his lips part.  Viggo blew smoke into Tuff’s mouth and the boy immediately started coughing, forcing Viggo to jerk back.

“Sorry!” Tuff managed, head already beginning to swim.  He laid back and gasped like a landed fish, the muscles of his ribs sore but starting to feel separate from him.  The pain wasn’t going, but it was slowly becoming less important.  He felt like he could almost think.

Viggo lit the pipe again, and this time when he leaned over the table Tuff arched up to meet him, desperate for the pain to stop.  Viggo let the smoke go slowly this time, forcing Tuff to inhale slowly, tendrils of grey smoke creeping out of his nostrils.  When he was finished he didn’t pull back, but began to languidly kiss Tuff, touch tender.  Tuff was too busy holding the smoke in to care much one way or the other.

Finally Viggo turned away, and he saw him take another puff, this one he didn’t share.  Tuff felt like his body was slowly disconnecting from him, the pain and heat becoming distant and unimportant.  He liked the feeling of the cool metal pressed against his back.  It was soothing.

The cloud of exhaustion that the fever had pressed him under lifted.  He felt…good.  He felt like he could get up and go running, or wrestle a boar.  He took deep, shakey breaths for the first time today and watched as Viggo put away his kit and began collecting tools once more.

The man returned to the table carrying the exact same tray as last time, presenting it with an identical flourish.  Viggo’s pupils were tiny points against a dark iris.  Tuff felt a strange thrill, realizing the man was completely shitfaced and still planning a surgery in his basement workshop.  He should have felt fear, but somehow it simply wasn’t there.  He lifted his head to watch as Viggo washed himself again and reappeared, a cloth tied over his mouth and hands spotless in front of his white smock.

Viggo began to carefully feel along Tuff’s ruined leg, squeezing and looking for something but Tuff didn’t ask what.  Handling his infected leg like that should have been a mess of agony, but while he felt something, like the tingle of a sleeping limb, it was far from pain.  He watched in fascination as Viggo tied a cord off tightly across Tuffnut’s thigh, picked up the scalpel, and began to cut.

 

The moon had begun to set when the backdoor of the house burst open, kicked by Viggo.  He began to walk out, carrying the boy bridal style in his arms. Tuff was pale and greyish, but he was grinning placidly, completely nude but uncaring.  His right leg ended at a red stump above the knee, thick black stitching closing a flap of skin over the wound, in an identical crescent as the other leg.  He was holding in his arms what he no longer had on his body. 

Viggo came to a stop at the stone rim of the oubliette, pressing a kiss to the boy’s temple.  “Now.” He murmured, taking the chance to smell his hair.  He smelled like disease and henna.  Hiccup had smelled like leather and sweat and machine oil.

Tuff gave an odd little cluck of a giggle and slowly pushed the leg off himself.  It thumped meatily against the metal grate and lay across it, putrid and glistening in the moonlight.

Viggo discretely pushed it the rest of the way in with his foot.  It flipped through the space between the bars and tumbled into the dark, landing with a faint, wet plop at the bottom of the pit.  A moment later there was crunching as something began to move.

Viggo and Tuff nodded at each other, and they turned and went back inside the house.


	4. Morning After

Tuff awoke to a pain he had no reference for, in the arms of the man who caused it.

For a moment, when he opened his eyes, he could have been anyone, anywhere, living any sort of life.  There was something warm pressed against his back and the heavy weight of an arm over his waist.  In the proper context it might almost have been soothing.  He took a deep breath, pointing his toes and stretching.

The nerves jumped to life with an urgency that turned his stomach to water.  Pleasant morning thoughts were washed away in the bright, chaotic flood of agony that pulled him under and wouldn’t let go.

Viggo awoke to the boy elbowing him in the ribs as he twisted, making some odd little ragged gasps.  He jerked back and blinked, squinting through the slats of light that made it through his boarded up window.  The boy’s hair was stuck to his face with sallow sweat, as was the thin sheet he’d wrapped him in last night to try to ward off infections from the bed.  Under the wet sheet he would see him shuddering and panting, back arched from pain.  He lay a palm on the boy’s stomach, feeling the ribs and muscles heave.  That the touch seemed to calm the boy was a happy coincidence.

Storm grey eyes focused on him.  He knew that in human memory he could change the story, go back and replay the memories of Hiccup over and over until they became twisted, and his boy had grey eyes, and suffered, but never died.  Maybe the fever and pain clouded and confused the boy, maybe he would never be the same after, but he would be alive. 

“Hiccup?” he asked softly.

The eyes rolled away from him, the boy’s expression flashing with despair before focusing on him again.

“Please.” He begged, voice a harsh whisper.  Last night he’d been laughing, and what was left of his throat was ragged and sore.  “It hurts.  It hurts so bad.” 

Hoarseness took most of the expression from his voice, and Viggo let his eyes flick down his straining body.  The stink of him wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been yesterday, though the sour odor of suffering still heavily filled the room.  He took the damp hem of the sheet between two fingers and began peeling it off him, revealing his pale, trembling body an inch at a time.  He heard the boy start to cry, and saw his hands clenching spasmodically at his sides.  He knew the pain wouldn’t kill him, not now, and most of the theatrics were just panic. 

The boy’s wiry frame had already begun to lose weight.  His heaving chest was sunken and his ribs raised the skin of his belly, creating a perfect amphitheater.  Pale, almost invisible hairs surrounded his nipples and met in the middle of his chest, almost disappearing before coming back on his belly, leading down to the sparse thatch of pubic hair.  His legs were thin but muscular, white like a Grecian statue before being capped with rolls of thick white bandages, already stained with seepage.

He was surprised by the boy grabbing into his arm, fingers weak but trembling with effort.  He looked up to meet his eyes to find them focused, but hazed with pain.

“Give me what you gave me last night.” He demanded, rasping.

Viggo blinked at him, surprised.  “My dear Hiccup, I couldn’t possibly.” He said smoothly.  “Razorwhip tar is extremely addictive, you must be—“

He was cut off by that hand letting go of his arm and grabbing ahold of his throat.  The boy was squeezing as hard as he could, which in his weakened state was only enough to make Viggo wheeze for a brief second, eyes wide.  Hiccup would never strangle him.  The idea surprised him so much he didn’t try to break out of the hold.

The boy’s features were red and twisted down into something terrible, like a grotesque on a monstrous cathedral.  “I need the stuff from last night!” he barked.  “Give it to me!”

Viggo stared down at him, wide eyed, and after a moment his trembling arm gave out and fell listlessly onto the sheet.  “Please.” He croaked pathetically, apparently changing tactics.  He looked fragile, a boy already deep in something terrible, and he felt himself relent.  He himself was not an addict by his measure, he merely used it medicinally.  He knew what it meant to need the tar, though, for everything that was terrible to just lift off your spirit.  The boy’s pleading gaze began to crumble and he began writhing on the sheets again, giving a low, open mouthed wail that sounded obscene to Viggo’s ears.

“I’ll…I’ll go get it.” He said, climbing off the bed and hearing the boy sob with relief.

 

Ryker shifted the basket to his other hand, opening the complicated metal gate that marked the wall of Viggo’s property.  His brother had built in a mechanism once that opened the imposing gronkle iron gates with a push of a hidden button, but when the intercom system he tried to build kept breaking he’d apparently given up and left the gate to open and latch manually.

He was working himself to the bone, between fixing up their mother’s place and being told to come over here and help out Viggo.  It was one thing when they were out at sea.  Around the men, Viggo projected an air of confidence and superiority, easily able to wield that silver tongue to get anything he wanted.  He was intelligent, quick, and merciless, and had turned dragon hunting from a survival activity to one of the widest reaching enterprises their people had ever known.  So long as Ryker played handler he was practically a ceaser.

But at home he had their mum to worry about, and the house, and around so many people who’d known him his whole life Viggo shriveled up like a flower and hid in his cellar, smoking tar and covering the walls in pinned up schematics and littering the floor with prototypes.  If he wanted to smoke that stuff it was his own business, but Ryker a hard time faulting the products. 

Their father had always tried to impart the virtue of hard work to them, and while Ryker had at least understood the intent behind the actions Viggo had always seemed to take it as a personal attack.  Their father hadn’t really been harder on Viggo, though he knew his brother had always felt like he had.  He’d just been more worried about him.  After all, at 13 Ryker was already working down at the docks to bring home money for the house.  At 13, Viggo had still wet the bed.

Ryker reached the front door and rapped, refusing to use the stupid shave-and-a-haircut code when they were at home.  He could see the value of knowing who was at the door when they were on the water, but this was home, and he knew he had to have built in some way to see who was coming.

He waited, but no one came to the door.  That meant Viggo had to be down in his workshop, because he was far too light a sleeper to not hear him.  Ryker sighed, trying the key.  Sometimes Viggo would get really into a project and not realize he’d been up the whole night.  He really hated these days.  It was much easier to get Viggo up than trying to put him down, especially when he was flying high and excitedly shoving things in Ryker’s face while he went on and on and on about what he was making.  He was 20 years past even trying to follow what the man was saying.

“Viggo!” he called into the kitchen, hesitating before opening the door all the way. 

For a pause there was silence, and then from somewhere in the house a ragged, ruined voice began to bellow in rough, hysterical screams for help.

By the time the basket hit the ground Ryker was already running into the house, grabbing the knife from his belt and ready to murder whatever man or beast was making his brother scream like that.  He crashed into the bedroom door, splitting the lock and shoving it violently into the room, knife poised to kill the attacker.

 

Of all the people Tuff wanted to come barging through that door, his captor’s older brother was pretty far down that list.  Tuff had froze, gaping in horror and almost hoping he was hallucinating, but the expression of shock that came across Ryker’s face when he saw him gave him a glimmer of hope.

Tuff’s threw his arms out towards Ryker, shaking and tear streaked.  “Help me!” he pleaded desperately.  “He cut off my legs, he’s crazy, you gotta help me!”

Ryker was staring down at him in dumb astonishment, not moving towards him at all.

Tuff pulled at his dyed hair desperately.  “Help me!  Help me!” he shrieked, repeating the words over and over until Viggo appeared behind Ryker in the doorway.  He immediately forgot Ryker was even there, instead reaching towards Viggo and the box that would make this stop.

Ryker glanced back at his brother.  The younger Grimborn was standing barefoot and shirtless, holding his damned tar kit and staring back at him with wide eyed shock.  He’d been bringing Viggo breakfast nearly every damned day for thirty years, you’d think at some point he’d start expecting him to show up.

A shrill, depserate scream from the boy on the bed got Viggo moving.  Ignoring Ryker he quickly crossed towards Tuff, setting the kit down on his bedside table and opening the box. 

The boy was up on his arms at the edge of the bed, eyes wide, feverish, and eager.  Ryker watched as his brother quickly went about setting up his pipe, apparently spurred by the desperate little whimpers the boy was making.  Gods, he was too practiced at this.  He pressed the pipe to the boy’s lips and helped prop him up while the boy desperately inhaled and held the breath.  When he let it out it was in a burst of coughing, and then he was back at the pipe like an unweaned piglet at the teat.

That couldn’t be Hiccup.  He knew for a fact that Hiccup Haddock was dead.  The boy looked like he’d dyed his hair recently, cut in the same style the Haddock boy had worn, but the face wasn’t quite right.  He was so distracted by the severed limbs he couldn’t place it right away.

The boy’s desperation began to drain away, and Ryker watched as he went slack against the bed, moaning softly.  He slowly began to step towards them.

“That’s not Hiccup.” He said, watching Viggo warily.  “Who is that.”

Viggo looked up at him, giving him a tense smile that he knew most people interpreted as confidence.  “This is the new Hiccup.” He said, gesturing vaguely. 

Ryker eyed him warily.  “Except Hiccup died.  And you got rid of the body.  Didn’t you?” he added, slightly confused.  “Wait, that’s not that other dragon rider, is it?  The blonde one?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Viggo said breezily.

Fuck.  Ryker scrubbed his face with a hand, trying to get a handle on this.  “And the legs?”

“Purely necessary operation, I assure you.” Viggo said.

Ryker looked down to the boy, sprawled nude on the bed but now with half lidded eyes and an expression of ecstatic relief.  “You.  Boy.” Ryker barked.  “Alright?”

The boy nodded, expression a bit dreamy. 

Ryker grimaced and glanced to Viggo, then decided this was not the hill he wanted to die on. 

‘Well your breakfast is out on the step.” He managed awkwardly, rubbing the stubble on the back of his head.

Viggo nodded, and glanced to the boy.  “You need to eat.” He ordered clearly.  “Lie still, I’ll bring you something.”

Ryker had been about to g fetch and salvage what was in the basket himself but to his surprise Viggo beat him to it, sweeping out of the room and out through the kitchen.  When he returned it was with a chipped plate, onto which he’d piled several of the butter cookies, two apples, and some disks of salami.  Ryker watched in almost surreal fascination as Viggo helped the boy sit up and propped him against his shoulder.  He broke apart one of the cookies and began feeding it to the boy, like he was a pet, and to Ryker’s shock the boy played along, leaning into him and eagerly taking the bites from Viggo’s hand.

When his brother was 8 he’d lost him in the woods beyond the villiage.  He’d been hunting for the family, trying to bring in a boar or even just a squirrel for the table, and Viggo was supposed to be helping him, but at 8 Viggo was a loud, short legged runt who never shut up.  Ryker had ditched him in a clearing, just for a few hours while he went and found food so maybe everyone wouldn’t starve.  He only came back with a rabbit, but when he returned to the clearing he found his brother laying curled up sleeping on the ground, and a changewing circled around him like he was its egg.

He’d shot the damned thing, afraid for his brother, but the arrow missed it’s mark and stuck in the thing’s cheek.  He hadn’t expected Viggo to be the one to attack him.

He’d kept the thing as a pet.  Their father had tried to kill it, wisely unwilling to let a changewing sleep near his son, but Viggo had trained it to do all sorts of useful things, and eventually their father had relented.  It had looked then just like the boy, attentive and wide eyed.

If he was being honest, Viggo had seemed to come out of his shell a bit when he’d had a pet.  He was not entirely certain under what circumstance their father finally demanded he get rid of, but from the thrashing Viggo caught Ryker thought he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to with the thing.  Their father had ordered Viggo to kill it, but when his brother couldn’t stop crying he’d done the job himself and lied about it.

He’d lied a lot over the course of their lives.

“I have to go…finish some work for Mum.” He said eventually, not entirely a lie.  Viggo barely looked up.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow, brother.” Viggo replied, not looking up at him.

 

His mother looked up expectantly when he entered the yard, his face turned down to the stones and shoulders set deep in thought.  Her eyes were deep and concerned, and he understood the question without her having to say it.

“Viggo’s fine.” He lied, absently rubbing the back of his neck.  “He’s…he’s taken in a boy.  The kid was hurt during the last raid and Viggo is…patching him up.”

Those dark eyes narrowed and Ryker felt a familiar spike of anxiety, waiting to see if she bought the lie.  After a long moment she gave a faint nod and smiled again, the same wet, submitting smile she’d had on for years now.  He didn’t know if that meant that she believed him or not.  Still, when he bent in to kiss her cheek she let him, and then swatted his backside playfully with the broom.  Relief flashed across Ryker’s face and he hurried along to the toolshed, ready to get back to work.

 


	5. Maces and Talons

Small yellow butterflies fluttered through the bursts of tiny white flowers that crowned the weeds in Viggo’s yard.  The property had been walled in entirely with heavy blocks, a haphazard construction style Tuff was now familiar with, and topped with iron spikes that seemed a little unnecessarily long for the city. 

Viggo had dragged the kitchen table out into the yard, and the sun beat down on the scratched surface, bringing the heat of the day into the uncomfortable range.  Though they were outdoors Viggo had refused to put clothes on him, insisting that fabric would be filthy and help reinfect the wound.  Instead he sat, slouched in a kitchen chair with what remained of his legs up on a box in front of him, exposing the stitches to the sterilizing rays of the sun.  Above him the sky was blue and infinite, and if not for the sounds of talking and motion in the streets he would have thought they were all alone in the world.

When Viggo reappeared from the kitchen door he was holding some wide box, looking pleased with himself and humming something with an odd, sharp precision.  He was dressed now, in a white linen shirt and wool trousers that would have seemed ridiculous on the feared hunter commander, but took the threat out of the man when he was at home. 

Viggo set the box down on the table, grinning broadly, and the boy’s expression immediately soured.

“Maces and Talons.” He announced pleasantly.  “My grandfather taught me to play.  Would you rather start as the honorable Vikings or the despicable raiders?”

The dead eyed stare was spot on Hiccup, and Viggo felt a tickle of discomfort.  He began setting up the board anyway. “The Vikings, of course.” He said, starting to set up the pieces.  The board was worn and a little loose at the joints, the features of the carved wooden pieces worn smooth and shiny from handling.  “This set was a gift from my grandfather when I was a little boy.  He taught me how to play.” He began, starting the monologue he’d used dozens of times when sussing out the thoughts of his men.  Usually their expressions would give the game away, but the boy just sat, blank but clearly displeased.

Tuff watched as Viggo prattled on, distracted as he was by the game set.  His actions were smooth and practiced, his voice even, but there was some sort of anxiety behind his eyes.  When the man finally sat down and laced his fingers in front of himself the smile was a little strained.  Tuff stared straight back at him, expression dead and trying to identify what had Viggo so anxious.  When he helpfully added “The Viking chief moves first.” A light went on in Tuff’s head.

Viggo wasn’t sure if he knew how to play.

Tuff stared down at his pieces with a theatrical frown, feigning deep concentration, before grabbing his chief and moving it straight across the board next to Viggo’s, an illegal and illogical opening move.  He watched the dismay run down Viggo’s face and resisted the urge to grin.  Oh, this was gonna be fun.

“Now Hiccup, the chief must remain stationary until the hunters have been deployed.” He said, moving the piece back to its starting position with a tone of forced patience.  “But before that you must determine your strategy.”

Tuff met him with a blank, cowish stare, and moved the traitor piece randomly into the blue painted ‘water’ squares on the board, ‘drowning’ it.  Viggo’s jaw snapped shut in irritation, hands starting to clench into fists on the table.  He reached across and moved the piece curtly back into position, starting to lose his temper.

“For your opening gambit I suggest moving one of your hunters into one of eight legal squares.” He said, quickly, tone sharp, and began explaining opening maneuvers like he was talking to a particularly dense child.  Tuffnut was more than used to this and merely stared back at him, pretending to nod along, before making an opening move at apparent random.  He saw Viggo relax slightly, and he reached forward and moved one of his own hunters out.  It was a soft opening move. 

 

No more than twenty minutes later Viggo slammed his fist down on the table, standing with such force that his chair fell back.

“You cheated!” he snapped childishly, and Tuff did his best to suppress the laugh, twirling Viggo’s chief idly between his fingers. 

“How?” he asked bluntly, watching Viggo’s eyes flicker over the board, clearly calculating and playing the game back in his head.

After a moment Viggo gave a frustrated shout and stomped away, moving to pace a tight little circle not far from the table.  The tantrum would have almost been cute if this guy wasn’t a complete psychopath.

Tuff looked over the worn board-game, considering.  He knew for a fact Viggo had multiple Maces and Talons sets; they were all over the house.  So why bring this one out to play?  He seemed to put a lot of value on playing a game against Hiccup.  Maybe the set was special.

Viggo turned around in time to see Tuff weighing one of the pieces in his hand, the other’s cradled in the crook of his arm. 

“What are you—“ he began, and Tuff pulled back and threw the wooden piece as hard as he could towards the oubliette.

The expression that crossed Viggo’s face, like he’d just shit on an altar, told him his instincts had been correct.  The man shouted and began running, but the piece bounced off the stone rim of the oubliette and landed in the dirt.  Tuff watched him scrabble to pick it up, and whistled to get his attention.  Viggo snapped his head to look at him, and his face collapsed into dread as he saw Tuff pull back to throw another piece.

“Wait!” he shouted, but then he was moving, trying to get underneath it before it could fall into the pit.  This piece was flying true, and he had to jump to catch it, landing hard on his belly on the iron grate and causing it to shriek in protest.  He looked down and saw Oswald’s green eyes staring hungrily up at him.

“Hiccup, please, I implore you—ah!”

Another piece was flying.  Viggo didn’t quite catch it, but at least deflected it into the dirt.  He did the math quickly in his head and realized the boy had 17 more pieces at his disposal.  The time it would take to run back to the table to knock them out of his hands was longer than it would take for the boy to throw at least one of the pieces into the oubliette, where Viggo could never retrieve it.

Tuff was ready to pitch another when he heard Viggo cry out plaintively “Tell me what you want, please, just no more!”

He closed his fingers around the piece, grinning.  He didn’t know what he wanted yet, but he was willing to find out.

“Bring me your kit.” He ordered, fingering the piece, the Viking chief.  Across the yard Viggo nodded quickly, climbing to his feet, his white shirt covered in dirt.  He hesitated warily but began to jog back into the house.

Tuff enjoyed a few minutes to himself in the midday sun, listening to the sounds of the city outside these walls.  Soon enough Viggo came running back, thrusting the kit at Tuff with a wide eyed, pale look.  Tuff grinned cruelly.  “Put it on the table.” He ordered.

Viggo did so, eyes flicking worriedly over the pieces in Tuff’s possession.  

“What would you do to get these back?” he asked, feeling out just how important this game set was.  It was the first tangible piece of leverage he’d had since the ‘accident’.

He was even starting to think of it that way in his head.

“Would you call Ryker an asshole?  Right to his face?”

The confusion and dismay that ran across Viggo’s features was priceless.  “Certainly, if that’s what you want.”

Tuff grinned.  It wasn’t anything like Hiccup’s.  The pupils of his grey eyes were still contracted into points.  “Would you suck Ryker’s dick?”

That got a reaction out of him.  “What??”  Viggo demanded, clearly starting to panic at least a little. 

Tuff started to laugh.  “Oh man, the look on your face.  Alright, alright, no incest.  Fine.  Would you suck MY dick?” he asked, twirling the piece casually.  “You know, to get your precious chess set back.”

As hoped, Viggo’s hands clenched into fists and he immediately shot back “Maces and Talons!”

“Yeah?” Tuff asked.  “So Maces and Talons you’ll suck a cock for but chess is for losers, huh?”

“I am not going to—“

Tuff raised the piece to throw towards the pit and Viggo threw his hands up, face a mask of alarm. “Don’t!”

“Then get over here.”

Tuff watched the older man’s expression change, first to anxiety, then anger, then nothing.  His eyes kept moving from the piece to Tuff’s limp cock, and after a moment he dropped down to his knees, tense and wary.

“Go on.” Tuff said, grinning.  “Touch it.  It won’t bite.”

The suffering look was everything he wanted.  Viggo began to reach forward, hesitant, but no more had he touched the boy’s foreskin than he pulled back and threw the viking chief as hard as he could.  Viggo’s shout of dismay was priceless, and he watched the man scramble to retrieve the piece.  Laughing, he began throwing them wildly about the yard, watching Viggo running and going to his knees in the dirt, frantic to keep the whole set.

When the man was thoroughly occupied, Tuff reached for the kit.  He deserved a reward.

 

On one hand, Viggo was strapping him back onto the cellar work table.  On the other, Tuff was already so high on tar by then that it wasn’t exactly frightening.  He let himself drift, enjoying the beautiful lack of pain, while the man tightly buckled the restraints around his arms and ribs.  The legs he left alone for some reason, and Tuff pedaled the stumps in the air for a moment, amused.

Viggo swept off into the room, slamming drawers and clattering metal.  Tuff jolted out of a doze he hadn’t realized he’d fallen into when the man slammed the metal surgical tray down next to his head.

He recognized the tools immediately.  After all, he was intimately familiar with these tools, not just once now but twice.  The first time he’d only felt their bite, the horrible clean slice of the scalpel through his sinew and muscle, and the booming orchestra of agony that was his communication with the saw.  The second time he’d felt the nuances, the delicate turn of the blade as Viggo guided it through the unknown interior of him, rending away all it touched.  The saw had been a thousand tiny assaults, each serration catching and destroying a little more of his frame, the vibrations through his bones showing him a vision of some unspeakable truth.

Instead of his leg this time Viggo grabbed for his right arm, pinning the elbow with his left hand as his right began stroking and prodding the soft inner side of his arm.  Despite the man’s apparent state of agitation his touch was delicate and precise, feeling out the lines of Tuff’s muscles and veins, sorting through his inner framework with an ease and familiarity that even Tuffnut didn’t have.  He felt a juddering shot go through his arm as Viggo found and pressed the nerve, and Tuff gave a tiny, involuntary gasp, shifting on the table.  That made Viggo pause, and he looked down at Tuff for the first time since strapping him in, eyes betraying him.

Viggo was afraid.

The delighted thrill that ran through him was like a cold mountain spring, burbling up until he couldn’t help but start to laugh.  He laughed in this dark cellar, that still stank faintly of death, an earnest, delighted laugh that made him kick his legs with glee.

Viggo pulled his hands away, but Tuff had already felt that he was shaking. 

“Stop that!” he shouted, clearly intended as an order, but the uncertain waver in his tone made the order ridiculous.  Still, Tuff tried to muffle himself, biting his lip and shaking with concealed mirth. 

Viggo seemed to try to compose himself, tugging down the hem of his filthy shirt and running a hand over his hair.  Tuff snorted through a muffled guffaw and tried to be quiet as Viggo stalked back towards him, trying to look intimidating.  It didn’t work very well. 

“Now.” He said sternly, taking ahold of Tuff’s arm again.  “Due to safety concerns, reasonable measures must be taken to ensure you aren’t a danger to yourself and others.”

Tuff couldn’t help it, he started laughing again, loudly, his face and ribs beginning to ache.  “Oh!  Oh!  The big bad dragon hunter is gonna cut off my arm, oh no!” he mocked shrilly, laughing so hard his legs were pulled up to his stomach. 

Viggo was shaking.  “Stop mocking me!” he ordered, fists clenched at his sides.  The boy just laughed harder, tears of mirth streaming down his face.  “STOP!”

He didn’t. The laughter was too loud, it was all he could hear, ringing through his brain like the pounding of his heart.  Viggo felt his hand grab for the tray and he felt a solid meaty thump under his hand.  The boy went suddenly and completely silent.

Viggo froze, eyes staring into the middle distance.  He couldn’t hear the boy at all now.  He swallowed and tried to collect himself, trying to warn his brain it was entirely possible he’d just killed Hiccup again.  When he looked down he saw his fist was resting over the face of the boy, the handle of the metal scalpel sticking out of his fist.  The blade was…  Viggo slowly, carefully, loosened his fingers around the handle, trying to hold it absolutely still as he lifted his hand away. 

The tip of the handle was nestled into the inner corner of the boy’s eye socket, pushing the boy’s eyelid out of shape as he stared upward with wide eyes.  Blood was slowly pooling into the socket, slowly creeping around and starting to fill the depression.  After a moment it spilled over into the boy’s open eye and he heard him give a shuddering gasp, his muscles tensing on the table.

He swallowed.  “Hiccup?” he asked cautiously.

He saw the boy’s throat work for a moment, and then he said very slowly and very quietly “Get it out.”

 

The blade had broken against the boney wall of the inner socket.  While the handle came out smoothly the rest of the blade did not, and Viggo stood there staring dumbly at it for a long moment before the blood started spilling over down the boy’s temple and into his ear, and he started to squirm.

“I said get it OUT!”  he bellowed, and Viggo immediately flew into action, fumbling a little with the restraints.

“My dear boy, lets get you sitting up with your head above your heart, try not to move your face and don’t look around.” He said quickly, a rambling prattle practically part of his autopilot procedures.  “Now just sit staring forward, that’s it, don’t move, I need to get some tools!”

He ran off, ripping open one of the equipment drawers and grabbing a pair of forceps, slamming the drawer thoughtlessly behind him and making the whole shelf jostle and clatter.  He came back to find Hiccup sitting stiff and upright on the edge of the table, fingers clenched around the gutter and eyes staring fixedly forward, doll-like.  One side of his face was stained, the whole orbital a mask of red, with lines drawn into his temple and down his cheeks like tears.  The image looked almost mystical.

Holding Tuff’s head still with one hand, he carefully pressed the forceps into the corner of his eye, seeing the boy flinch back at the cold metal.  He clucked soothingly at him as he pressed the skin back and nudged the forceps into the opening, carefully probing until he found the metal end of the scalpel blade.  The boy was making small sounds with each move of the tool, but they didn’t sound like pain.

He pulled, and the boy hitched, hand coming up to cover the fingers that held his skull in place.  He didn’t try to pull them away, just held it there, trembling slightly.

The blade came out, and so did more blood.  He quickly put the forceps and blade on the tray and grabbed for a clean white towel, pressing it to the socket.  The boy gave a small keening sound and put his hands over to hold it tight.  Viggo let him.

“The eye isn’t punctured.” He said quickly, trying to sound reassuring.  “The blade didn’t cut deep enough to reach your brain.  There’s some bleeding, but it should heal and the eye should stay completely functional!”  The anxious smile he offered was not nearly as reassuring as he would have hoped.

After a long moment the boy raised his head, looking at him with his one storm grey eye.  It really looked nothing like Hiccup’s.  Hiccup’s eyes were rare, pure emeralds from the east, valuable and clever and wise.  This boy’s were thunderheads rolling in on a turbulent sea, booming and rending and whipping the waves into a violent maelstrom.  Viggo swallowed a dry mouth.

“I want to go back upstairs.” The boy said slowly, his voice still a rough rasp.

Viggo nodded, and moved in to pick him up, holding him against his chest with surprising gentleness.  Tuff sighed and put an arm around the man’s neck, pressing his hot face into the dusty linen of his shirt, the cloth still pressed firmly into the socket.  That eye was seeing a strange wave of colors, bursting over him like he was going through a tunnel.  He didn’t know if it was the knife or the tar.

He set Tuff down on the kitchen counter, the summer heat having met him as they climbed the stairs.  Tuff slumped, resting his elbow on his knees, holding the towel over his eyes.  Viggo (belatedly) had gone to the sink and begun to wash his hands.  Tuff didn’t have it in him to laugh anymore.

When the man returned he gently pulled Tuff’s hand away, tilting his face up so he could see the wound in the light from the window.  The bleeding had mostly stopped, though the surrounding tissue was beginning to swell.  He carefully dabbed at the wound, then took the towel with him as he put on the kettle to boil.  He began rinsing out the towel in the sink, mouth tight and brow furrowed.

Tuff didn’t ask him any questions, or even mock him.  He felt exhausted, the sort of exhaustion that doesn’t lend well to sleep, and could only sit and watch him, the input from his injured eye still reddish and flashing with color.  Viggo always seemed to move in such clean, practiced motions, moving on the earth in an almost ghost like fashion, but still now as he wrung red stained water out of the towel his hands were shaking just a little. 

He rinsed the towel again and came back to him, gently cupping Tuff’s face and turning it up so he could look again.  Tuff cooperated easily, letting Viggo carefully blot the crusted stains from his cheeks and temple, his eyebrow, and around the lids.  His fingers were so careful this time, like Tuff was something fragile or precious that could break.  He let out a shaky breath, which Viggo fortunately seemed to ignore.

The man looked at his work silently, and Tuff thought he was going to kiss him again, but this time Viggo only let him go and returned to the sink, leaving him in peace.

Tuff let a hand card absently through his dyed hair.  “So what is it about Hiccup?” he asked quietly, voice only slightly louder than the movement of water in the sink.  “Why do you want him so much?”

Viggo breezed right through. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He said.

Tuffnut persisted.  “Is it the dragons?” he asked weakly.  “Dagur was obsessed with Hiccup because he could ride dragons.  Well, and that he killed the Red Death.” He added absently.  “You know, I helped with that.”

Viggo gave him an odd look, but it was at least regard, and he pressed on.  “Is it the leg?  The hair?  The eyes?  I even have an extra leg missing, two for the price of one.”

His tone was laughing, but when Viggo looked at him his eyes were wet and brimming.  He mechanically began preparing the hot poultice, something uncomfortable wriggling in his gut.  Without answering Tuff he took the boy’s face in his hands again and gently but firmly pressed the hot towel against the wound.  Blood immediately bloomed on the fabric, and Tuff winced, hitching and closing his eye.  Tears were starting to leak down onto Viggo’s fingers.

He swallowed uncomfortably and brushed a thumb across Tuff’s cheek.  “Do you want me to start calling you by your real name?”  he asked softly.  “Tuffnut, isn’t it?”

The boy let out a ragged sob and pressed his face into Viggo’s palm. 

“I don’t want to be Tuffnut.” He hitched, face starting to run with more than just blood.  “Don’t make me be Tuffnut.”

Baffled, Viggo wiped at the tears, expression at a loss for the first time in Tuff’s memory.  “Why not?” he asked gently.

He wasn’t prepared for Tuff’s arms to come up and wrap around his neck, clinging onto him and he tried to hide his face against his shirt.  Viggo’s need to keep the heat and pressure on made the action awkward, and he had to force Tuff’s head back to a sitting position.  The boy seemed to take it hard and began hitching and wailing like a small child, that strange monotonous sound that seemed to come from deep misery, letting his arms fall down to his side and only leaning into the touch as much as Viggo would allow.

“I wanna be Hiccup.” The boy was crying.  “I’ll be your Hiccup.  Please, I’ll do anything.”

He couldn’t abide this crying.  Not knowing what to do, he moved between the boy’s thighs and wrapped him up in his arms, letting the wound be unattended for a moment.  Tuffnut sobbed brokenly and buried his face in Viggo’s throat, wrapping his arms around his neck and holding on as tightly as his wounded body would allow.

It took some time for the boy to quiet.  He cried into Viggo’s collar, further ruining the fabric with reddish tears and snot.  Viggo have given the shirt up as lost and let him do it. 

Eventually it seemed that the boy had quieted, and Viggo risked pulling back slightly, wanting to see what the damage was.  He tilted the boy’s face up and saw he was red and puppy eyed like a child, mouth trembling and one side of his face wet with diluted blood.  He carefully cleaned the area again, seeing the boy press into the touch.

“Hiccup.” He whispered.   The boy’s grey eyes brightened, looking at Viggo with some sort of ruined desperation that he’d seen before.  Usually it came just before the killing blow.

He kissed his forehead lightly instead, feeling the boy hitch and lean towards him.

This time he kissed his lips.  He tasted like sickness.


	6. Pivot

 There were a lot of things Ryker would rather be doing than knocking on Viggo’s door this evening.  He’d rather run down to the dock and hop the nearest boat, for example, but since hearing about Viggo’s new ‘ward’ this morning their mother had immediately begun planning a dinner for them.  Ryker had done his best to convince her it was a bad time, that the boy wasn’t feeling well, but he’d never had any luck stopping her when she wanted to do something.

That was how he ended up standing on Viggo’s doorstep, looking like he’d rather be eating nails, and knocking lightly on the door.  He was carrying the market basket again, this time with the smells of roast chicken coming out of it.  He’d killed the birds himself this afternoon.  Behind him, their mother was holding lightly onto his arm and staying mostly concealed from the viewer.  Viggo never let her inside. 

His brother opened the door without a shirt on, looking pissed.  There were a few red dots on the front of his trousers, which both of them noticed immediately.  Viggo saw his mother peeking out from behind his brother and his tirade died before it could even start.  He paled and slammed the door, and the sounds of his feet retreating into the house.

Ryker cleared his throat, not looking forward to this, and knocked again.  He tried the knob after a moment, and the door swung open into an empty kitchen.  Ryker noticed immediately the table was missing, and felt himself tense a little.

“Viggo?” he called, wanting to give his brother time to hide or put away whatever the hell it was he’d been doing.  Their mother pushed past, however, and he winced in anticipation as she crossed the kitchen, peeking into the next room.  Viggo was back in a moment, still buttoning a hastily thrown on shirt, hair a bit mussed., and blocking her from going further  The smile he was giving was his patented ‘everything is fine and there’s no need to be suspicious’, which hadn’t worked even when they were kids.

“Moher!  What an unexpected and pleasant surprise, please, do come in.” he said, even as he stood in the doorway, preventing further ingress.  “Ryker.” He acknowledged.  “To what do I owe this honor?”

Ryker answered.  “She cooked dinner.  She wants to meet your new, uh, ‘ward’.” He said, trying to give Viggo a hint.

Viggo looked at him.  “My ward?  Ah yes, you must mean the boy, Hiccup Haddock.  Terrible accident, lost his one good leg in an incident on our last journey.  He’s very tired though, and quite weak, perhaps another day would be best—“  He was trying to guide her back towards the door but the woman refused to move.  She was looking at him with an almost pleading expression that made him want to yell at her to mind her own business.

“Viggo, I think she means to see him.” Ryker added, sounded exactly as uncomfortable as he felt.

Viggo glanced between the two, then seemed to come to a decision, expression calming.  “Of course.  Give me a moment to get him ready.  He’s not quite fit to receive company.”

 

Tuff was awoken to panicked hands dragging him to the edge of the bed, and gave a low whine, trying to roll away.  Viggo was relentless, though, and managed to manhandle him into a sitting position.  “My mother’s here.” He said breathlessly, and for a long moment Tuff was certain he’d misheard him.

“Your mom?” he repeated, making sure that was correct.

Viggo pushed on “She made dinner, she wants to meet you, and I think we have to eat.  Ryker’s here too.”

Tuff frowned, hazily trying to picture the scene.  He barely registered that Viggo was threading his arms into a shirt, forcing him into it.

“Your MOM?” he said again, feeling out the concept.

“Yes, my mother.” Viggo snapped.  “What.”

Tuff shrugged slightly.  “I dunno.  I guess I just never thought about you having a mom.”

The look Viggo gave him was unexpected.  “What, you think I just rose whole out of the sea, from foam?” he said, grabbing trousers out of his clothes cupboard and pushing Tuff onto his back again.  The boy yelped and then whined ad Viggo grabbed his legs, forcing rough wool down over them and aggravating the wounds.  A lot of the tar had worked its way out of his system while he slept, and while the pain wasn’t terrible yet it was back, nagging at his nerves.  He let Viggo dress him, a little too woozy to fight, and cooperatively wrapped his arms around Viggo’s neck when the man picked him up.

Ryker hovered awkwardly in the kitchen with his mother, trying to keep busy by unloading the basket, but the missing table foiled his plan.  He awkwardly unloaded things on the cutting board, instead, feeling the vague absurdity of it all.  When they heard Viggo’s footsteps on the boards again they both looked up, their mother for her own reasons but Ryker to see how badly this was going to go.

Viggo appeared in the doorway, wearing an unfortunate, awkward grin again and carrying the slip of a dragon rider in his arms.  Ryker was certain that slit next to the boy’s eye hadn’t been there this morning.  Still, his expression was calm, his body relaxed, pale and hanging languidly onto his brother.  Some of the dye still stained his forehead, like it did Viggo’s hands, and he carried an odd, wounded smell with him.  The legs were their own strange moment, both ending abruptly but at different points, the wool trousers concealing any information.

Their mother aimed her smile at both of them, stepping closer to Tuff.  Tuff wasn’t sure what he would have expected Viggo’s mother to look like, aside from maybe a wolf.  The woman in front of him was remarkably normal, though her face was lined with age and worry.

“I’m Hiccup.” He tried, a little lamely, reaching a hand out to shake.  “Hiccup Haddock.”

She took his hand with great delicacy, like she was afraid he would break, and let him shake.  She was giving him such a weird wet smile he wasn’t sure what to do.  Fortunatly Viggo’s stressed prattle kicked in.

“He was injured in a sculdron attack,” he lied, not seeing Ryker flinch and unaware his brother had given a different story earlier that day. “Lost both legs to the beast.  I’ve been trying to nurse him back to health.”

The look his mother was giving him could have pierced gronkle iron.  He felt his mouth go dry and sweat start to form on his brow.

“Is that chicken?” Tuff demanded abruptly, sitting up in Viggo’s arms.  “Is that a roast chicken?”

A little confused, Ryker glanced to where the roast chicken was sitting on the cutting board.  “Yes?”

A look of acute distress crossed his features, and he whined.  “I can’t eat chicken.  I promised Chicken I wouldn’t eat another chicken as long as she lived.”

That got a quizzical look from Ryker, but Viggo smiled softly, adjusting the boy in his arms.  “But you never had a pet chicken, Hiccup.” He said gently.

The boy turned to stare at him for a moment, and then he seemed to perk up, expression lifting.  “I didn’t, did I.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Tuff looked excited, if a little desperate, chewing the corner of his mouth.  Ryker was the one who interrupted “Where’s the table?”

Viggo blinked.  “Outside.” He said blankly.  “We were…playing a game outside.”

“Maces and Talons.” Tuff chirped in.  “We were playing Maces and Talons.  He showed me this old set his grandpa made for him, we had a really good time.”

He felt Viggo relax gratefully beneath him. Ryker rolled his eyes.  “I’ll get it.” He said, stalking off into the yard.

 

In the quiet kitchen all four of them sat, Ryker, their mother, and Viggo and Tuff, the last two sitting side by side on a crate he’d pulled to the table.  Ryker had given their mother the only real chair in the house, and as much as losing his seat rankled Viggo he knew that this was not the time.

Tuffnut was the only one actually eating.  They were all holding their cutlery, Ryker and Viggo’s postures mirroring each other, but Tuff was the only one with his head down over the place, pulling the joints of the chicken apart and shoving the meat in his teeth.  He had an odd, feverish intensity to him, but seemed completely oblivious to the appraising stare the boy’s mother was giving him. 

Several minutes passed with no sound aside from Tuff’s chewing and smacking, and when his plate was mostly empty he looked over at Viggo’s, still sitting completely untouched.  He snatched a chicken drumstick off the other man’s plate and began eating it before the man could stop him.  Viggo’s astonished expression was amazing.

 Tuff jabbed Viggo in the ribs with the point of his elbow, making the man cringe away comically.

“Eat.” He ordered, glaring at Viggo.

Viggo’s owlish expression of shock was amusing too.  He didn’t look up to see Ryker and their mother mirroring it.  Only when Tuff jabbed him again did he cautiously reach out and pick up one of the biscuits on his plate, staring at Tuff suspiciously as he put it in his mouth and took a bite.

Tuff nodded, satisfied, and looked back down at his meal.  On the other side of the table, Ryker and his mother exchanged surprised glances.  All four of them returned to eating.

 

That night on the step Viggo’s mother stopped and stood looking up at him, eyes watery and so very deep.  Further down the path Ryker had already walked to the gate and stood there, waiting, while inside Tuffnut still sat at the table, watching his back.  In the light of the lantern she looked so old.  The lines of her face stood out in sharp relief, and for the first time Viggo noticed that the tiny crinkle at the corner of her eyes had blossomed into full crows feet. 

She placed her hands gently on the sides of his face, those strong, calloused hands he remembered now seeming so small and cold.  She pulled him down to her and pressed a dry kiss to his forehead. 

Tuff saw Viggo stare out into the dark after her, long after he heard the gate creak close.  When the man finally turned he closed the door and stalked quickly out of the room, keeping his face turned down, but Tuff was certain he saw unshed tears standing in the man’s lashes.

 

The Viggo Grimborn who carried Tuff back to bed that night was a different beast from the one who terrorized the dragons of the archipelago.  The shirt he was wearing was soft and mended, but probably not by him, and his hair needed trimmed, the length enough to soften his appearance.  Tuff could see why he kept it shorn so close, but unlike his brother it hadn’t begun balding in the back, meaning he didn’t have to shave it yet.  Viggo would look horrible with a shaved head.

The man lay him down on the single bed with surprising gentleness, the thin feather mattress accepting Tuff’s weight and shape.  It was the only feather bed he’d ever slept in.  It was also the first time he’d been full in over a month.  There had been chicken, roast potatoes, and collard greens, which both brothers had tried to avoid eating like they were kids.  Tuff had stolen it off their plates instead, earning him astonished looks from both brothers when they saw the food missing.  By the end of the meal Viggo was trying to sneak him bites off his plate like a dog.  Tuff had refused to assist him in avoiding food, and he could sense the man’s frustration as he was forced to eat.

Tuff didn’t understand how Viggo could be so skinny.  His mother’s cooking was amazing, and while he knew that he was biased, seeing as she was the first person who seemed to realize he needed fed on a regular basis, it was also true.  Tuff gave a satiated sigh, laying his hands on his belly and thrilled to find it sticking out slightly.  Before he had time to realize he wanted it, Viggo was already holding out the pipe to him.  Thrilled, he sat up and pressed his lips to it, letting Viggo run the workings as the beautiful, ecstatic smoke poured down his throat and into his lungs.  There was no pain.

He opened his eyes slightly, holding the smoke in and wanting to see the man.  The hardness seemed gone from him, his eyes sheened with a tiredness that didn’t seem entirely physical.  Tuff pursed his lips and blew a thin stream of smoke into his face.  Viggo recoiled and blinked, a look of oddly hurt surprise on his face.  Everything seemed to wound him so much.

Tuff let him raise the pipe to his lips again, taking in another beautiful lungful of serenity.  When Viggo pulled the pipe away to reload, Tuff snaked his fingers around the back of the man’s head, feeling his short hair slip between his fingers, and forced Viggo’s face to turn to his.  The man’s eyes were wide, afraid and wincing back from whatever he thought Tuff was going to do.  He pulled Viggo’s face down to him and pressed their lips together, opening his mouth and feeling his teeth brush Viggo’s lower lip.  The man jumped, like he expected him to bite, but Tuff held him firm, pressing his tongue lightly against Viggo’s lips in the hope he’d open them. 

Viggo gave a faint whine but parted his lips, teeth still shut behind them.  Tuff breathed out slowly, the smoke slipping out a gap between their lips and burning their noses.  Viggo recoiled, and Tuff blew the rest of it in his face again.  Viggo’s expression was sullen, like a teased child, his eyes oddly wet.  Had he done something wrong?  Had he not done a good enough job at the dinner?  True, he’d been a bit bossy, but his mother seemed to like him, and wasn’t that the point?  Maybe it was that that was upsetting him?

Tuff said the man’s name softly, barely a breath, and Tuff saw those dark eyes flicker up to him.  He looked so hurt.  But why??  He’d done everything he asked, what more did Viggo want?  Feeling slightly desperate, Tuff grabbed Viggo’s head with both hands and forced him down, pressing their lips together harshly, a dry, clueless mash.  He felt Viggo’s body tense, then tremble, and the man hitched against his mouth.  Tuff let him go, chest hurting strangely, and Viggo stepped back and off the bed, looking away into random corners as he tried to school his expression.

“Viggo.” Tuff whispered.  The man wasn’t looking at him, and he held his arms out pleadingly.  “Come here.”

At the soft plea he saw Viggo’s mouth tremble, and the man stepped forward, gracefully sinking to his knees like a knight before the king.  Tuff cupped the man’s chin, tilting Viggo’s face up to regard him.  This time he held still, and Tuff leaned slowly forward, heart fluttering and not sure if this was alright.  His lips met Viggo’s and it was a clumsy, juvenile kiss, teeth bumping lips and Viggo mostly frozen, his breath shallow and quiet.

When Tuff pulled back, searching Viggo’s features for some sign, he saw that Viggo’s face was streaked with tears.  Desperate, he fluttered his fingers over Viggo’s cheeks, trying to wipe them away.  He was fucking this all up.

Viggo made an odd, strangled sound that Tuff realized was a sob, and then the man had grabbed his hand, bringing it to his mouth and pressing his dry lips against his fingers.  Tuff felt his heart hammering in his throat as Viggo pressed hopeless kisses into each fingertip and line, beard scratching his skin now and then as tears fell onto the bedsheet, some patting warmly on the inside of Tuff’s elbow.

After a moment, the display broke down into horrible, heavy sobbing, Viggo’s mouth pulling back into an  involuntary grimace.  Tuff had never seen an adult cry like that in his entire life.  He fumbled for words, clueless on what to do, before Viggo surged forward and wrapped his arms around Tuff’s ribs, burying his face against his stomach and bawling like his heart was broken.

Tuff lay his arms helplessly on the man’s back, rubbing small circled and inwardly starting to panic.  He could hear Viggo repeating something, his mouth pressed against Tuff’s belly muffling the sound, and he shifted to try to hear better.

Viggo was bawling Hiccup’s name, mouth working, and Tuff felt his heart plummet.  Of course.  That was what this whole thing was about, wasn’t it; Viggo was in love with Hiccup.  And he’d killed him.  And now all he had was this consolation prize with a dye job and the wrong color eyes.  He felt his throat begin to tighten.

“I’m right here.” Tuff managed to keep his voice even.  “Shh, I’m right here.  I’m not going anywhere.”

Viggo hicced.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he babbled against Tuff’s shirt.  “I’m so sorry, Hiccup.”

“it’s alright.” Tuff lied, though it felt weak in his own ears.  “It’s alright, I’m right here.”

Except he was, wasn’t he.  Here, in a city he didn’t even know the name of, where no man knew him from Adam, he wouldn’t have to be a pathetic lone twin anymore.  could be anyone, even Hiccup.  Starting to calm, he carded his fingers into Viggo’s short hair, listening to the man hitch an sniff.  When he spoke again his voice was calm and even.

“Viggo.” He said softly.  The man actually looked up at him, and Tuff lay a hand on his cheek, searching those dark eyes for some sign of understanding.  “I’m right here.” He whispered.  “Viggo, I’m right here.  And I’m alive, and I’m safe, and I’m right where I want to be.”

He saw a moment of confusion in Viggo’s eyes, then what hurt was there seemed to soften, become quieter.  “I love you, Hiccup.”  Viggo confessed, eyes desperate and wounded but not fooled.  He knew this wasn’t really who he wanted.  Tuff felt a familiar ache settle into his stomach.  “At first I wanted to kill you, but then-then it became like a game.  Moving towards each other on the board, slowly, and I almost had you.  You were almost mine.”  The desperation in his tone made misery coil up in Tuff’s stomach.  “I’m sorry.  I should have tested the gas.  I’m so sorry.”

Tested the gas.  He meant kill his own men to make sure he wouldn’t kill Hiccup.  For a moment a bubble of anger rose up inside him, remembering his sister’s hair as she floated face down in the water, fanning out around her head like a halo.  Viggo hadn’t even thought about her since he’d done it, had he? The anger burst against the hurt in his chest, though, and he quashed it down, pulling Viggo’s face up so he could kiss his forehead.  He heard him give a small gasp, like redemption.

“I forgive you.” Tuff said clearly, looking into Viggo’s eyes and willing him to understand.  “I forgive you.  And I’m sorry.  And I want to stay.”

He saw Viggo’s expression collapse in an almost ecstatic misery, and the man threw his arms around his shoulders, pulling him against his chest and squeezing him harder than he would have thought the man capable of.  He squirmed, trying to breathe, and Viggo loosened his hold on him. 

“Stay.” Viggo whispered, cupping Tuff’s face and starting to pepper it with kisses.  “Stay and don’t ever leave me again.”

Tuff swallowed.  “I won’t.” he promised, voice wavering.  He’d meant it to be a lie, but as the words came out he felt something calm, the frantic buzzing in the back of his mind telling him he needed to escape, he needed to figure out how to get home, how to move on his own, how to tell Stoick he’d killed his son, how to tell Mom and Dad he’d killed his sister.  He let out a shaky breath and wrapped his arms around Viggo’s neck, pressing his cheek against the man’s stubble.  “I won’t.” he breathed.  “I’ll stay.”

He heard Viggo hitch, and Tuff turned his face up, brushing his lips against his beard.  He liked the texture of it, the way it rasped across his skin, and the little line that ran up to Viggo’s lower lip.  He lightly kissed that lip, hearing the man draw in a breath, then sealed it in his lips with his own. 

Viggo was still held stiffly by the side of the bed, tense, and Tuff tugged at his ear gently.  “Come closer?” he pleaded softly.  He felt Viggo shiver and the man crept slowly onto the bed, like he was wary of being shoved away.  He was sitting in an odd folded position, and when Tuff leaned in to kiss him again he realized why.  The man had an erection, and was trying to conceal it. 

For a moment the absurdity of that made him pause.  Tuff wasn’t exactly handsome.  He knew it, he wasn’t ashamed of it, but he knew that he was no competition with Hiccup (or apparently Fishlegs)  Even before the accident, he’d been boney and a bit ugly, but it had never bothered him much, because who was he going to impress anyway?  Astrid?  His sister? 

Now, though, that he’d lost even more weight, and his…legs…this guy was interested?

Viggo looked away in embarrassment when he realized Tuffnut saw, but Tuff swallowed and caught his sleeve.  “Can I see it?”

The look of horror that crossed Viggo’s face made him flinch back, and the man immediately scrambled off the bed.  “My apologies, I seem to have forgotten myself.” He babbled, knocking over the bedside table and bending down to right it.  “Let me get this cleaned up here and I’ll go down in the workshop to get something done—“

“Viggo?” Tuff tried lamely, ashamed.  The erection had probably had nothing to do with him, and he’d just humiliated the guy and made an ass out of himself.  If Viggo heard him he gave no sign, and kept the babbling up all the way until the bedroom door closed behind him.

Tuff sat staring after him in the quiet room, listening to his footsteps retreating down the hallway and onto the stairs.  It was only when he heard the cellar door lock did he realize Viggo had taken the tar kit with him. 


	7. Communion

When Viggo was 12 their father had brought down a gronkle.  When the carcass was dismembered viggo dragged the wings out behind the shed and let the ants peel them down to bone, checking in constantly to see the bits the ants dismantled.  He spent the better part of a week sitting in the untended, weedy grove behind the outbuilding, rearticulating and reinforcing the wings, stretching catgut where the tendons were gone.  He’d finished the wings with heavy oilcloth that stretched between the bony fingers, and then fashioned the straps.

At night, when the house was quiet and his brother was drooling into the pillow next to him, he’d gotten up silently and put on his clothes, wearing extra layers even though the night was warm.  He’d climbed out the kitchen window, unable to lift the heavy beam that held the front door shut, and ran through the dark to the shed to collect his wings. 

Under a thin sliver of a moon Viggo had stood on the top of the seacliffs, looking out over the silvered waves as they rolled quietly in the moonlight.  Above, the sky had been clear and deep, a void with spills of stars cascading down it, almost like a road he could follow, if he could just get high enough.

He’d spread his arms, the wings moving fluidly with his fingers.  He’d felt the thrill of the light breeze rustling his clothing, almost calling him to the ledge.  Taking a deep breath, Viggo paced back from the cliff, steadied himself, and with an odd laugh launched his thin body into the void.

He’d learned that night that just because something should be, doesn’t mean that it was.  He’d watched the distant moon distort and waver as the sea pulled him down into the dark, and until the current smashed his thin body against the stones he’d felt the only bloom of peace he’d ever felt.

He’d learned, years later, that after the fishing crew had delivered Viggo back to his home, broken and barely breathing, their father had taken Ryker out back and beat him with the strap so badly he couldn’t sit down for a week.  Apparently, it was Ryker’s job to stop him from reckless endeavors.

The cellar door locked, Viggo had set up his kit and gotten to work.  The world made sense down here.  Here he had only to come up with a plan, execute it, watch it succeed or fail, and then try again, learning from his mistakes.  Not like out there, where things go wrong and people die, and other people kiss you on the mouth.

He sat at the steel topped workbench, crouched unhealthily over his tools as he carved very precise notches in the metal strip in front of him.  Beside him sat a small stack of already finished pieces, all identical forms that seemed to interlock somehow.  The raw strips were dropped in a messy pile at his feet, the stone floor dusted with the carbon black from the forge.  The forge itself, a mammoth thing built into the wall and under the house, was only visible in the room as a wide rectangle that glowed deeply orange in the dark.  There had been lamps, several hours ago, but when the oil ran out Viggo hadn’t noticed much, continuing to work from touch and the faint light from the forge.  It was mostly automated at this point, and he hadn’t had to get up to tend it since getting it up to temp.

On the work table behind him Viggo’s kit was set up, and every few pieces he made he spun around on his stool and took another hit.  He was getting more work done on this project in this one night than he had in the past few years.  Overhead the heat dispersal pipes shuddered and groaned, a miserable chorus over the dull roar of flames.  They had been shuddering steadily for some time, a sharp rhythm that he felt was almost like a heartbeat.  Sometimes it even seemed to groan his name.

When the cellar door came tripping and sliding down the stairs he heard the racket, but paused to finish his work beforehand.  That meant he had no idea Ryker was there until the man grabbed him and hauled him off his stool, shaking him like a rag doll.

Stunned, Viggo just hung for a long moment, mouth gaping and watching his brother’s lips move.  Ryker’s face was twisted down in a furious snarl, clearly telling him…something…

It took a moment for his mind to connect the sound he was hearing with the movement, and suddenly it was like the audio came on.

“—shit on him and Mum thought it was YOU this whole time, you need to shut him up or get rid of him.”

Viggo blinked.  “Hiccup?”

The look of disgust and unquiet that flashed across Ryker’s face didn’t quite make sense to Viggo, but Ryker shook him again, making him squawk and start struggling, the same mindless flailing he’d done as a little boy.  Ryker tossed him back onto the chair, expression dark.

“In case you’ve been too high to notice, that dragonrider is on your bedroom floor half rotted and covered in shit.” He said, sneering.  “You can’t introduce him to Mum like that and then just let him die, she’s already started making him a new tunic.”

Viggo rubbed at his face, eyes absently flicking past Ryker to the tar kit still sitting on the table.  “Oh, do stop being dramatic, brother.  It’s only been a few hours, he’s probably just whining in the hopes you’ll take him out of there.  I’ll bring him out to breakfast and he’ll be alright.”

Ryker sneered.  “It’s nighttime.” He said, like he was talking to a fantastic idiot.  “You already missed breakfast.  I didn’t want to break down your door so I left it in the kitchen.  What the hell’s going on with you?”

Viggo blinked at him, surprised, then smoothed back his hair absently and stood, straightening his wrinkled tunic.  His eyes were bright and reddish, the heavy bags darker than usual.  “I’ll…I’ll be right up.” He said, sounding tired.

Looking t him suspiciously, Ryker turned and stepped on the broken door as he made his way back up the stairs.  Viggo watched him go, then turned and quickly began tidying his work space, stacking all pieces into even rows and lining his tools up neatly, perpendicular to the edge of the table.  When it looked surgically neat he turned and began his trek up to the bedroom and whatever was waiting for him therein.  Halfway up the stairs he paused, turned, and ran back down, quickly packing up the tar kit and putting it under his arm.

 

Walking in, that kit was the most beautiful thing Tuff had ever seen.

Without his command his arms went up, reaching towards Viggo like a child wanting to be picked up.  He didn’t pay any attention to Ryker, who stood nearby with his arms crossed, and as Viggo moved towards him he snatched at the kit, causing it to tumble to the floor.  The tin box burst when it struck the floor and the contents spilled out, but Tuff scrabbled to collect them, hands shaking horribly as he put the pipe to his mouth and fumbled with the odd lighter.  Viggo knelt next to him and steadied his hands,  helping him get the pipe and fire together while he picked up the small jar and stated his practiced ritual of measuring a dose.  Soon Tuff was frantically sucking in lungfulls of calm, and Viggo had begun to look him over, completely ignored so long as he didn’t interfere with the pipe.

The tar had worn off by the time Tuff woke this morning, and for a few hours he was alright so long as he didn’t move much, except to plainatively call for Viggo as his legs itched and screamed.  He’d heard Ryker come in with breakfast and called to him, but Ryker had yelled at him to shut the fuck up, and he’d tried to be quiet for a while.

By noon he was in hell.  He desperately had to use the bathroom and the burning itch of his stumps was driving him crazy.  He’d begun to scratch himself through his wool trousers, awakening the pain of amputation, but the moment he pulled his hands away the itch was twice as bad.  He tried yelling for Viggo again, then anyone, finally accepting that he was alone and he was not going to stop having to use the bathroom anytime soon.

He managed to roll to the side of the bed and tried to pull his trousers down, succeeding in the front and taking a long, burning, heavenly piss onto Viggo’s bedroom floor.  It was better than sex.  Try as he might, though, he couldn’t figure out how to get off the bed aside from falling, and a particularly bad bout of intestinal cramps was beginning to make this not a matter of if, but when.  Within a few hours he was trying to pull himself off the bed, arms shakily supporting his top half as he dragged the screaming stumps behind him.  He made it onto the floor with a shriek and tried to get his trousers off, but he couldn’t manage to do it in time, and had his first accident of his adult life.  When Ryker had found him he was sprawled on the floor with his pants shove down around his thighs, drifting in and out.  The smell coming off him wasn’t just shit by now, either. 

The tar seemed to take ages to kick in, but soon the pain began to fade, then quiet as Viggo put the pipe to his lips again.  He laid back on the dirty floor, pale and trembling slightly, his lips tinged with blue.  He was barely aware of Viggo stripping the trousers off him.

The stitched were half popped and shit stained wool fibers had worked their way into the wounds, which were inflamed, a red edged with white.  He saw Viggo’s face turn pale, but didn’t register why.  The pain peeled away from him like bedsheets and he lay with his head tilted back, mouth partly open and sheened with a foul sweat.  He looked almost like he was coming.  When Viggo touched the stump above his knee pain jogged through Tuff again, distantly, and he moaned.

“Help me clean him up” Viggo said, voice a million miles away, and the argument the two brothers began barely seemed to exist in the same world as him.  The world, which had been getting too real and painful for Tuff’s liking, had again drifted back into pleasant fog.  He didn’t fight as the brother’s picked him up and began to carry him outside.

 

“Tuff.”

His name was whispered, a faint puff of air far above him that could be easily dismissed.  Except it came again, closer this time, and Tuff furrowed his brow, turning his face away.

“Hiccup.” He muttured into the void, correcting the air itself.  There was a pause, then, with a heavy, terrible love, it repeated the name back to him.

Tuffnut opened his eyes.

He knew this ceiling.

The cellar workshop was brightly lit, and hot.  Sweat slicked and clung to him, and he turned his face away from the stone ceiling, looking around blearily for Viggo.  The man was standing next to the Tuff’s hip, looking down at him with his hands clasped behind his back, hunched slightly so he could look down at Tuffnut with a burning, cold intensity he’d seen before.  Tuffnut felt his stomach drop, terror making him flinch down against the table and shut his eyes, whining, unable to meet his gaze.  Viggo had been wearing nothing at all, his pale skin scrubbed pink and the thin hair that covered his chest and spilled down his stomach shaved clean. 

He heard Viggo’s voice again, the intensity spiking another pang of fear through him, but with some strange tenderness behind it that make his skin break out in goosebumps.  “Open your eyes, Hiccup.”

Tuff’s stomach clenched and he shuddered, forcing himself to take a slow breath before slowly opening his eyes.  Viggo was still there, still looking at him like he could see through his skin into the inner workings of him, and Tuff realized that in a sense, he could.  There was a static blankness behind Viggo’s stare that Tuff knew meant the man was thinking, not just thinking but creating complex catalogs of directions and information, planning every possible action and contingency a hundred moves in advance.

Viggo reached out and lightly ran his fingers across Tuffs brow, barely touching his skin, and Tuff took a shivering breath. 

“We have to perform another operation.” Viggo said smoothly, his tone so carefully managed that it was surely false.  He didn’t leave a pause for Tuff to think, only listen.  “The sites of the previous surgeries have become infected, and the infection is spreading too fast to wait and see what can be saved.  If the infected tissue is not removed immediately you will die, do you understand, Hiccup?”

Tuff hitched, feeling a familiar iciness stab through him.  He swallowed, and managed to nod, tears coming to stand in his eyes.

Viggo’s fingers trailed down his chest to his stomach, his palm spreading out over his belly in what would have been a comforting gesture, if his eyes hadn’t been so blank.  His skin was stifling in this hot room.

“I’m doing this to save your life.  I love you, Hiccup.”  Both statements had the same infection, off and somehow cold.  Still, it made something inside Tuff’s chest tense, the tears starting to fall.

He continued smoothly, as though nothing he’d just said could possibly be relevant to anything.  “This operation is going to involve two separate procedures, one for each leg.” He pulled his hand away and touched his index finger to Tuff’s inner thigh, slicing an imaginary line across the tendon and vein and up around his hip, outlining the socket.  That iciness seeped through Tuff’s stomach and he whined, shrinking down in distress.  “I will be removing both limbs at the joint, taking independently only two and three inches of healthy flesh to try to keep ahead of the infection.  We can’t have you cough during the procedure, so I will only administer the anesthetic before and after each operation.  Do you understand?”

Tuff nodded, shivering.

Viggo patted his thigh coldly. “You’re a clever boy,”

The man moved away from the table, and Tuff turned his face back up to the ceiling, sniffling and trying to stop himself from crying.  Even with the wrong name, Viggo’s statement of love had hurt in some terrible, good way, the admission making his heart thrill while the iciness crept further into his veins.  He tested his wrists to find they had again been bound, and it comforted him somehow. 

When he again opened his eyes Viggo was back, standing over him with a cloth tied around his hair and another around his face.  He hadn’t gone to nearly these extremes the first two times to prevent infection.  Tuff wondered almost giddily if that meant he really might die this time.

Viggo helped him prop his head up to take a few hits off the pipe.  Tuff coughed weakly and shivered, watching Viggo’s eyes fixedly now that they wouldn’t meet his.  The distance was frightening him, and only as the tar began to slowly spread its calmness through his veins did he recognize that Viggo was afraid.

“Viggo?” he called weakly, speaking for the first time since waking up.  His voice was dry and rough but the man looked at him, eyes meeting.  They flickered and looked away again, pain starting to creep around the edges of his eyes.  Tuff called his name again, softening, and he saw Viggo swallow and look back at him.  He made himself hold his gaze, trying to stay steady.

He offered a strained smile, which looked so drastically out of place Viggo blinked at him, then snorted despite himself and started to chuckle.  The laughter almost immediately degenerated as he put his hand over his mouth, muffling a hysterical hyena laugh and tears began to stream from his eyes. 

Even dosed with tar Tuff still knew that a hysterical man should not be taking a knife to another human being.  “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” He said awkwardly, unsure.  “It’s not like you’re cutting me up just for kicks this time, right?”

That got a shrill, hitched sob, and Viggo turned on his heel and marched away from the table, disappearing into the scrap area.  Tuff laid there, shivering and afraid to move, and listened to the faint sound of Viggo working the gas lighter out in the shop.  The smell of stale tar smoke eventually reached him as he lay, sweating and shivering.  Eventually Viggo reappeared, and the useless blank look was gone from his eyes.  Instead there was a purpose behind the intensity now, which seemed almost worse.  Still, though, as those eyes pierced through him Tuff felt exposed down to his very bones.

Viggo picked up the scalpel and gave it a twirl.  The light flashed off it, and Tuff remembered the feel of that blade sinking into the red muscle of his thigh.  He shivered.  Instead of moving straight to the cut Viggo bent and pressed a dry kiss to Tuff’s forehead, the cloth between them, and Tuff felt himself sigh softly.  The hand not holding the blade reached out and lightly touched the reddened skin below Tuff’s knee, just above the ruined surgical site.  It should have hurt, but the tar had dulled it, making it only a distant, intimate ache.  He made a soft sound and watched Viggo anxiously as he bent down and pressed a kiss to the infected flesh. 

“I am sorry.” He murmured softly, ghosting his lips up a gentle kiss at a time.  Tuff felt his stomach squirm as viggo’s mouth approached the line he’d drawn around Tuff’s socket.  He pressed a long, worshipful kiss to the crease in his skin that would soon be the end of his body, and Tuff whined softly, shifting in his bindings. 

“Are you ready?” Viggo murmured. 

Tuff swallowed.  “W-wait.  I want to hear you say that to me again.” He managed.  “Say it to me first.”

Viggo frowned slightly.  “Say what?”

Tuff’s voice wavered, and he almost didn’t get it out.  “Tell me again.  Say you love me.”

He was coming to recognize the flummoxed expression.  Finally Viggo gave an odd smile.  “I love you.” He said meaninglessly.

Tuff whined.  It wasn’t enough.  “Kiss me?” he pleaded pathetically.  He was surprised to see Viggo waver, uncertain.

“Please?” he whispered.

Viggo’s hands cupped his hot face, the scalpel handle pressed against his temple.  Viggo had changed the blade but the handle was the same that had gotten stuck in his eye, and he shivered despite himself.  When Viggo pressed his lips against Tuff’s he was surprisingly tender, almost like he was afraid Tuff was something fragile that could be broken.  He was surprised to feel the faintest tremor in Viggo’s hand.

“How much tar do you have left?  Enough?” he asked quietly.

Viggo bit his lip, but then nodded hesitantly. 

“Get the rest.”

 

The blade sung into his skin like an old familiar melody, the small metal piece slicing down into him like he was barely there, a ghost.  His nerves rang their familiar, terrible panic as Viggo’s hands spread the skin ahead of the blade.  The man was bent down over Tuff’s pelvis, pupils constricted to pinpricks and a thin sweat already standing on his brow.  Tuff couldn’t lift his head high enough to see what he was doing, but he could feel it.

The blade pierced down near the back of his leg, behind the tendon of his groin, and he hitched as he felt the blade slide forward, encountering the thick cable and catching there a moment.  Viggo’s fingers pressed in firmly on the tendon and the blade suddenly slipped through, snipping it like a string.  His nerves howled with what couldn’t really be called pain, a deep, instinctual panic that he was being rent apart that no amount of experience or practice could calm.  The knife continued to slide towards the front, and Tuff felt a sudden dizziness as the table beneath him began to warm and something hot and wet jumped out of him and splattered on his thigh.  He was bleeding, then.  It always seemed to start suddenly.

Viggo’s hands never faltered or shook, guiding the blade suddenly down, slicing shallowly through the skin on the front of Tuff’s thigh.  Tuff gasped and shuddered as it gracefully turned a U, the blade moving like an ice skate over his skin and veered back up towards his hip, carving out a generous closure flap.  The blade reached the far side of his hip and deftly slipped out, leaving him trembling and sweating on the surgical table.

Tuff knew what happened next.  The anticipation made his stomach knot, and he tried to squirm to relieve it, dully horrified to find his leg would not respond.  He could feel it, it only lay there, tingling and throbbing.  He giddily tried to tell himself that soon there wouldn’t be any pain at all.  Viggo would take away the bad parts that hurt him, and the tar could take away the rest.

Having put the scalpel down Viggo gently traced the edge of the flap with his fingers, separating the skin ever so slightly.  Tuff took a deep, trembling breath and looked up at the ceiling, trying to stay still.  He felt the tips of Viggo’s fingers press down into the cut and hook, wedging their way into the place between skin and muscle Tuff had only just learned about since coming here.  He felt Viggo grip the other side of his skin with his thumbs and, with a smooth, unfailing motion, he peeled back the pale skin on the front of Tuff’s thigh, the skin lifting with a strange, wet sound, like pulling a steak off a cutting board.

The exposed nerves on the front of Tuff’s thigh screamed, and he made a reedy sound, trying to hide his face in his elbows.  He knew how this would feel without the tar numbing his senses, and the hollow echo of the old pain made him want to jump off the table.  He held still, though, feeling Viggo’s fingers in that liminal space between skin and muscle that very soon would be gone.  Viggo gently lay the living skin back onto Tuff’s belly, where it sat hotly, his mind howling at the incorrectness of his skin and leg no longer being in the same place.  Viggo had turned, and he heard the faint sound of metal on metal as Viggo lifted the next tool from the tray.

The saw.

The teeth were sharp and gleaming, cleaned mercilessly, and Tuff gave a low wail as Viggo brought it around to bear on Tuff’s thigh.

The metal teeth biting into the hot muscle of his thigh was unreal.  Tuff threw his head back, letting his eyes closed as the teeth ripped down, shredding through muscle and sinew as it ruined interior structures Tuffnut only became aware of as they were destroyed.  When it reached the bone the saw rattled through his skeleton, scattering any thoughts and replacing them with only the screaming song of the sawblade.

The other side of the bone felt like almost afterthought, the saw tearing through in only two strokes as Viggo leaned into it, sweating profusely.  Tuff’s blood had gotten onto his arms and, somehow, his temple.  The sweat was making it run down his jaw, a trembling red sweatdrop standing in his whiskers.

He put the saw down on the tray with a clatter and quickly moved back to the boy, working the straps before grabbing his leg and pulling.  As the column of flesh moved away from him he realized he couldn’t feel Viggo’s hands on him anymore.  He heard the limb hit the stone floor with a soft splot and found himself starting to shake.  His leg still burned, still itched, but when he lifted his head as best he could to look there was no leg to scratch.  His body simply ended on that side at the pelvis.  He saw with some dull horror that the cloth Viggo had used to tie his genitals out of the way was completely soaked in blood, as was the skin on that side of his hip. 

Viggo’s hands were swift as he pulled the flap of cooling skin back down and pressed it over the open socket, the head of Tuff’s thighbone still visible in the oval of exposed tissue.  He could feel Viggo’s fingers pressing through the skin, pressing into places that had never existed until now.  He moaned shakily as Viggo fitted the flap in place, the world seeming to soften around the edges as the man went to work on him with the needle and thread.  He felt the soft pat of the sweat as it fell off Viggo’s tense face, landing in the mingled hot wetness of his bloody wound.

The needle stabbed into the rent skin near his premium and lightly pricked the skin of the front of his thigh as it exited immediately, an impossible feeling that did not help his uneasiness.  Viggo expertly tied the knot, snipped the string, and moved a centimeter up to do it again.  As he saw Viggo furiously wipe his face with a blood drenched arm he thought he saw the faintest tremor, and wondered exactly how much blood loss would be too much this time.  The tar did wonders keeping him awake and calm, but it didn’t make it easy to tell when one was in actual, physical danger.

Well, more danger than his leg being cut off.

The tremor meant he was worried, right?  It meant he cared what happened to him, even if he’d lied about… about loving him.  Viggo had done this to him twice before and it had turned out alright.  The blank anxiety that was holding Viggo’s expression hostage should not make him afraid.  He could trust him with his life.

Tuff must have drifted away for a moment, because when Viggo threw the needle and scissors back at the tray the crash made him jump in his binds.  The wounds had been closed, the flap stitched in neatly like it belonged there, and Viggo was shaking openly.  That scared Tuff more than the amount of blood.

He looked at his face for the first time since the surgery began and reached up to tenderly cup his cheek.  Desperate for reassurance, Tuff nuzzled his cheek into Viggo’s palm, slick and stinking with the hot, dangerous smell of blood.  Viggo stroked his cheek with his thumb soothingly, painting him.  The faint tremor was still as long as he was touching him.  “That’s halfway.” Viggo said, voice likewise controlled but clearly false.  “Tuffnut, where I’m cutting I’m unable to tourniquet the limb, and your bleeding more than is…controllable.  Do you understand?”

He really didn’t.  He shook his head, a little blurry and wanting to hear Viggo explain it to him.  His voice was so smooth and certain, like things would be alright.  “H-Hiccup.” He corrected shakily.

He didn’t catch the flash of anguish that cross Viggo’s face.  He pushed on as though Tuff hadn’t corrected him.  “If I don’t take the infected leg, you’re going to die of it in a matter of days.” He said firmly.  “I can try to make you comfortable, but I can’t stop the progression.  If I take your other leg to stop the infection, you will likely die right here, right now.”  He saw Viggo’s throat work as he swallowed.  “It is unlikely you will survive the procedure.”

Tuff felt a cool shiver go through him, almost like a thrill.  “Y-you mean I’m gonna die no matter what you do?”

Viggo, pupils constricted to pinpricks, nodded. 

Tuff rolled his head back on the table, the metal no longer cool, instead wet and clinging.  The basement was hot and reeked of blood, tar, and sweat, and he was slicked with his own fluids.  This was hell if he had ever seen one, but there wasn’t much better waiting for him above.

“Viggo?” he asked, voice small an trembling slightly, like he was a child. 

The man flickered.  “Yes, Tuffnut?”

The boy closed his eyes as tears pricked at the corners.  “Hiccup.” He corrected again, voice strained.

When Viggo didn’t respond, he pressed on.  “I w-want you to take the other leg.  I can handle it.”

Viggo stiffened with alarm.  “No.  No, that’s exactly my point, no you can’t.”

“Y-yeah, but what’s the worst that could happen?” he said, grinning lamely and joking in a decidedly un Hiccup fashion.  “I die?  Oh man, that’s…that’s such a loss… You’d have to feed the rest of me to Dagur’s dad and then he’d have…he’d have a complete set.”

That odd look of dazed horror on Viggo’s face made his nerves hum, and he bucked a little on the table, making a wet smacking sound as his skin slapped into blood.  It got his attention, but it didn’t change his expression.

“Laugh, damn it.”  He ordered weakly, having to stop and cough a little. 

Viggo’s face cracked like an egg and he surged at him, catching his face in his bloodied hands and bending to press their mouth’s together, the kiss unskilled and hard, but Tuff arched up into him desperately, tears beginning to trickle from the corners of his eyes again.  When the man pulled back slightly, eyes feverish and prying, Tuff gave a high, anxious laugh.  “Y-you know, I’ve never really been good for anything to anybody...  The only reason they let us stay in the dragon riders is because my sister is g-good at everything. She was the one who knew how to do everything, she was the one who could talk to everyone and smooth things over, I was just this dumb kid tagging along all the time, I couldn’t even s-sleep alone and she was- she—”  he swallowed, mouth pale and quivering.  After a moment he gave a single bark of strained laughter.  “I’m not…I get to see her again, right?”

Viggo didn’t even pause.  “No, Tuffnut.” He said, smoothly, as though they were discussing whether the water was wet or the sky was blue.

That got more startled laughter from him, and his face reddened with two blotches high on the cheek, curling slightly on the table.  Something akin to real fear flashed through Viggo’s eyes and his hands were suddenly at his hip, pressing in the slick flap of thigh skin.  He must have started bleeding again.

“You say that like…like it’s just a fact.  You don’t know.”  He continued tremulously.  “Everybody always said that-that when you die you get to go to V-Valhalla.  And meet Odin.  Unless you die a crappy death, anyway.”

Viggo’s eyes stayed averted, focused on his work.  “Tuffnut, by your own internal logic, even if there was such a thing as magical, all seeing, invisible father figures that float up in the sky and give a single solitary fuck what happen to us, and even granting the absurd notion there’s more to you than this sack of rotting meat, you still wouldn’t get to see your sister again.  She died in battle.” He paused and lifted his fingers, than quickly clamped them down again before continuing. “ You’re going to die of wound putrefaction and blood loss in a filthy basement hundreds of miles away from home, and then all that will be left of you is food for the vermin.” He said this all in neat, clipped tones, like he wanted them to cut into him as cleanly as the scalpel. 

Tuff laid quiet a moment, watching Viggo’s tense expression.  He knew the man didn’t have to look to put pressure on the wound.  “Viggo, why are you saying these things to me?” he asked quietly, though his voice still wavered a little. 

If anything the man’s expression darkened at his name.  “Because I’m a realist, Tuffnut, I believe in what really exists in the world, and fairy tails about giants and eight legged horses are purely, one hundred percent fiction.  The god’s aren’t real, your sister is gone forever, and so will you be in a few hours.” He said, tone sharp.

Tuffnut made himself take a deep breath, ribs shaking.  The words hurt.  Of course they did, they were designed to, and Tuff made himself relax and accept the ache of them sinking into his chest.  The coldness he felt was becoming more corporeal, something real that seemed to creep up from below.  He clenched his stiff hands into fists, trying to test himself, and the joints creaked and shuddered, his hands feeling slightly numb.  Oh Thor, he was really going to die.  This was what it felt like for it to settle upon him.

“Y-you’re trying to hurt me.” He managed, causing Viggo’s eyes to flicker up at him for a moment.  He wasn’t sure what he was going to say until it was already out of his mouth.  “You want to hurt me because…because then I’ll get mad at you, and we’ll fight, and then it won’t hurt when Hiccup dies again.”  His throat felt tight, his eyes oddly hot and thick.  “That’s why you’re calling me Tuffnut.  B-because it doesn’t matter if Tuffnut dies just H-Hiccup.”  Tuff hitched and stopped himself, sniffing and trying to get himself under control.

The man’s hands had gone still.  Tuff didn’t see that Viggo’s skin had gone ashen, his face sallow and blank with dread. 

Tuff’s sniffling was broken by a sudden, bitter laugh, tears starting to slip out from his puffy eyelids and falling into his hair.  “You don’t even deny it.  W-well hey, here’s your last chance, huh?  I’m the last living Hiccup Haddock you’re ever gonna get.  What do you want to do with me?”

The blank look on Viggo’s face flittered briefly into the field of horror, then stabilized.  “I…I don’t understand what you mean—” he began smoothly, and the tone electrified Tuff’s body in rage and misery.  Smooth words from Viggo’s lips were always lies.

“Yes you do!” Tuff erupted, almost screaming it at the stone ceiling, and Viggo actually jerked back.  For a moment there was complete silence, filled only with Tuff’s lungs pumping like a bellow.  After a long pause he started again, more evenly “S-stop lying to me.  You’re a terrible liar.” He managed. The shock that flashed across Viggo’s features was almost worth it.  “I heard what you did.  The men talked down below decks and I could hear every word from down in my cell.  They knew what you did.  And I know.”

Viggo opened his mouth again to lie and Tuff cut him off, biting out the words. “You fucked Hiccup’s dead body.” He spat, and the space behind Viggo’s eyes went completely vacant.  “You k-killed him by accident and then you fucked his dead body.  Not even once, like for weeks.  You slept with it.”  He paused to swallow, and his pale lips quivered.  “I’m n…I’m not really him, but I’m the closest you’re ever going to get and I’m still alive.”

There was a pregnant pause, in which Viggo looked like he was frantically trying to disapparate on the cellular level with his mind.  Finally his mouth began moving, opening smoothly to lie once again, and Tuff exploded “I’m saying fuck me you fucking idiot I know you know what I’m talking about!”

That left silence in its wake. Viggo stared, eyes wide and round, his expression something that would have been comical in any other context.  Tuff was the one who broke the silence with an odd sound that could have been either a laugh or a sob.  “H-hiccup.” He rambled.  “I can’t even…I can’t even compete with his corpse.  W-what about him brings you guys in, huh?”  he paused to snort mucus back into his sinus.  He’d panicked about this before.  “I mean, he’s got everything, he’s handsome yet damaged and approachable, he rides a huge dramatic one of a kind dragon, he’s the next chief of Berk so that kinda makes him royalty, but like… he’s also super dead, and like…I know I never was half the things that he was I mean I don’t have anything going for me I’m kinda ugly and nobody would ever—would ever—’

Viggo saved him from saying the rest of the thought.  He yanked the cloth down from his face and bent down, pressing a stern kiss to Tuff’s lips.  Tuff began trembling all over, and after a long moment Viggo pulled back, standing to look down at him.

“Tuffnut, it’s going to be alright.”

His tone wasn’t completely smooth, not his normal magicians patter.  This time it was simply a lie.  An obvious, trembling around the edges lie.  Tuff tried to take his next breath and found he couldn’t.  His chest had tightened around his lungs, squeezing his heart cruelly.

“I’m sorry that my…skills were not sufficient.” Viggo said stiltedly.  This frame was tense, his jaw clenched tight when it closed.  It wasn’t a lie.  Tuff felt himself shiver, and wasn’t sure if it was from the apology or the blood loss.

“I’m sorry, too.” Tuff said, and realized he meant it, though what he was apologizing for he wasn’t completely sure.

The only reaction Viggo gave was the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. 

 

Viggo had worked the pipe, taking in long, deep breaths and holding them a moment, eyes closed and shivering now and then as he tried not to cough.  Then he’d bend down and press his lips to Tuffnut’s, letting the boy open his mouth and blowing the smoke into his lungs.  He’d always wanted to be kissed with the same intensity that Tuff gave to that smoke, and he supposed something stolen and not meant for him was better than anything else he was going to get. 

The ritual of lighting the pipe, inhaling, and bending to steal the boy’s kisses was soothing, and he was so tempted to just keep going, to smoke until the boy slipped away and he himself blacked out.  He’d ‘experimented’ before to find the fatal threshold of tar, but the amount it had taken even to make him black out and vomit was an amount they didn’t have time for.  The boy was going to die one way or the other.  And he…he should take what he could get.

He returned the pipe back to its tin box slowly, determined not to shake and hoping the tar would steady his hands for him.  He stalled a few moments putting everything away and then turned back to the boy.  He’d been reduced by a quarter, a pale, bloodied remnant of a man, with the rotting swelling creeping across the remainder of the half.  His lips were bluish, his eyes slow, and Viggo knew there was only so much the tar could make up for. 

He pulled the barrier cloths off his face and hair, knowing they were useless now, and kept his composure as he bent at the waist and lightly, almost chastely, kissed Tuff’s cool lips.  The boy made a soft sound and tried to press up against him but Viggo pressed a thumb to his chin and held him still, keeping the kiss light, almost ghostly.  He couldn’t say….anything…knowing the boy couldn’t understand how terribly empty his world was, but maybe he could still communicate something. 

Tuff’s lips moved against his as he whispered “Untie me.”

Viggo shivered slightly and immediately moved to comply, smearing blood on the metal buckle and the smooth skin of Tuff’s forearms as he worked it.  Finally he got it loose and pushed the straps aside, gently taking Tuff’s wrists and helping him lower them back to his side.  It should have hurt a little, but Viggo could see in those eyes that there was more tar then understanding in him right now.  It was almost calming.  After all, if he was comfortable then nothing mattered anymore.  He’d be dead soon enough.

Tuff slowly raised his hands, clearly weakened, and pressed his cool palms to Viggo’s stubbled cheeks.  He was looking him in the eye.  Hazed and clearly not fully present those eyes were a like looking up through the eye of a tornado, some distant point of calm in a tumultuous whirl.  Hiccup’s eyes had been like looking through an emerald.  They were not the same.  He reached down and lightly touched the skin that barely covered Tuff’s socket.  The boy’s expression only flickered faintly.

An uncomfortable sensation of déjà vu rolled through him and he forced himself to looked away from his eyes, breaking away from the boy’s hands.  He stepped towards the foot of the surgical table, out of his reach, and untied the ruined leg that remained.  The boy made no attempt to move it, instead just breathing shakily as Viggo gently lifted his knee, pressing his thigh to the side and letting it fall almost clinically, leaving him in a froglike sprawl.  Tuff let his eyes roll towards the ceiling as Viggo lay a heated palm on the inside of his thigh.

Viggo thought he might have some machine oil…somewhere…but he couldn’t leave him now to rifle through his worktable.  The boy was still bleeding slowly, time would not do him an favors.  He simply had to make up his mind and do it. 

“I’m sorry.” He said, using the fingers of his left hand to spread Tuff’s asscheeks apart.  The blood from the surgery coated his ass, leaving a tan spot around his puckered hole.  He prodded at it, then refusing to think about what he was doing he wiped his fingers in the blood, pressing in again and this time his fingers slid in, if roughly.  He heard the boy hitch and looked up quickly, but Tuff only lolled his head, breathing shallowly. 

 

Tuff drifted out for a moment, coming back to himself to the feel of something warm and heavy pressing against the back of his thigh.  His head snapped up in surprise and he squinted, bleary, to see Viggo had climbed up onto the surgical table and now knelt there, gently holding Tuff’s remaining leg around his waist.  Tuff struggled a moment and then managed to hook the limb around Viggo himself, making the man give a soft whining sound that seemed entirely out of place.  He was surprised to see Viggo was erect, though he kept his hand on it, moving like he’d lose it if he stopped for a moment.  Still, it was there, and if was for him.  He felt a sudden giddiness to see it, unimpressive as it was, and gave a breathy laugh .

“Lie to me.” He ordered, ignoring the dismal despair crossing Viggo’s features. 

“I love you.” The man said flatly.  Tuff laughed at that.  He sounded like somebody trapped, a POW in his own basement, and the idea that Viggo was being forced into anything was absurd.  Not for a second rate imitation.  He felt pressure against his anus and arched slightly, heart fluttering, and let a low bleat as something breached him, splitting him open, and while he could feel that there had been damage the tar kept it from being painful.  Viggo, expression tense and strangely focused, leaned his weight into it and made Tuff squeal as he settled all the way home.  From the waist down they were a horror show, all blood and sweat, and he felt Viggo dig his fingers into the back of his knee as he balanced there. 

He'd never been someone people were attracted to.  The only thing he could really consider sexual experience was what he and Ruffnut had done when they were twelve (which had gotten Tuff beaten black and blue by their father, who had promised to cut his dick off if he caught them doing that again).  If he really stretched, perhaps the hard on Snotlout had gotten when they wrestling and ground against him, but neither had been the same as this.  He could barely feel anything, just the numbed ache of violation and the occasional dull pang as Viggo moved slightly inside him.  It had to be the tar that made it feel that way. 

He felt a loss before the man shifted his hips and shoved home again, getting a surprised yelp from Tuffnut as his thigh bumped the new stitching, sending a jangle of near pain up his nerves.  He cried out lowly, crossing his arms over his face and hiding his eyes from the light.

He’d expected this to hurt, but the tar seemed to numb the pain just as thoroughly as it numbed the new opening to his body, leaving only the strange sensation of something moving inside of him, forcing him open again and again as his muscles spasmed around it.  It was sending a hot, shivery feel through him, to where his limp cock was still bound up in a bloody cloth.  He shifted his hips as best he could, arching a little, and let a small sound of surprise as the feeling arced and shivered through him as Viggo seemed to hit something particular.

He felt one of Viggo’s hot hands spread across his stomach, pressing him down against his thigh, and he whined as he tried to shift back into the right position.  The coldness was spreading slowly through him but none of that mattered.  He pulled his arms away to look up at the man who had killed him, vision distorting slightly, thought from the tar or the blood loss he couldn’t tell.  Viggo was looking down at him with pain in his eyes, not masked by their usual blankness, and his stomach squirmed at the sight.  He was hurting for him.  Maybe it was for Hiccup, maybe it was for his dual loss, but still he was the one making Viggo look that way.  The hazed pain seemed conflicted as he moved inside him, and Tuff squeezed experimentally, thrilled to hear Viggo give a small sound and close his eyes, almost grimacing.

“Viggo.” He panted, making the man look up to meet his gaze again.  His pale face was flush with shame.  “Viggo.” He said again, and the man looked away, closing his eyes as he subtly began to move just a little bit faster. Tuff let his own eyes drift shut, mouth continuing to move through the name like it was a prayer, breathing it with every exhale.  As Viggo, grimacing and tense, pushed his way closer to the edge Tuff’s voice slowly rose, becoming a rasping litany, and it seemed like moments later Viggo’s hand was pressing down hard into his face, fingers sprawled flinchingly over his cheeks and eyes and his palm twisting Tuff’s mouth shut.  Panic fluttered through him as he tried to twist under him, eyes squinted shut and arms shoving weakly against Viggo’s chest.  A few moments later Viggo suddenly stopped moving and slouched over him, the palm pressed over his mouth sliding down, dragging his lip awkwardly .  Tuff spent a moment getting his breath, looking up at Viggo in bewilderment. 

He felt Viggo slide out of him and took a moment to realize that it was over.  Viggo was limp, and must have come inside Tuff when he was distracted.  His stomach twisted that he’s missed getting to see it, to see Viggo’s face as he lost control inside him, because of him.  He felt the dull pang of loss as the man slid off the table and stood a moment, trembling as unsure. 

“Viggo.” He sighed one more time, feeling the strength slide from his body as he realized it was over now.  Everything.  His eyes slid towards the ceiling and he let them close, the painful light of the cellar workroom replaced with the cool, comforting darkness.  He heard Viggo moving in the room beside him and tilted his head, listening to the sound of footsteps and the faint movement of steel.  From somewhere in the dark he heard the soft sound of the saw being lifted from the surgical tray.  IIt’s intimatly familiar song made the icy thrill crawl through his stomach.  He felt Viggo’s hand press against his thigh, pressing it firmly down into the cold, wet steel.  He felt the sharp blade prick at the top of his thigh, and heard Viggo take a deep, shuddering breath.

He began to saw.

 

 


	8. Sighting

When the whole world goes to shit, it’s the clever and the brave who adapt, who take advantage, and who thrive.  Trader Johann liked to think of himself as one of these men.

The collapse of the archipelago’s trading system had come about very abruptly, with the death of Hiccup and his little band of dragon riders.  The loss of the Edge itself had not been of any particular import, as they hadn’t ever been a big client, but what did ruin everything was what their disappearance did to the tar market.  The dragon hunters themselves had been the only real clients in the archipelago for razorwhip tar, the constant fighting with the dragon riders limiting supply and raising prices past what most of these Vikings could afford.

That didn’t mean there hadn’t been any market for it, but it was one he’d been comfortable staying out of.  After all it was small, primarily limited to a select clientele, and drugs were always a risky venture, especially when one had to make friendly with men like the Grimborn brothers (or worse their processors) for a supply.  He’d been happy enough to manage the little odds and ends that no one ever  had the balls to order from their primary suppliers, or just as often needed to hide from their wives.  His was not a profession he could necessarily brag about, but there were perks.

That is, until the death of the dragonriders opened the market on razorwhip tar.  Without those perky kids beating back hunters in the razorwhip’s primary territory they had easily overwhelmed the Wing Maidens, and what had been a conservation breeding operation quickly became a for profit razorwhip mill.  It had taken only a few months for the supply of tar to increase enough that sellers began to offer it to less affluent buyers.

Surprisingly Berk had shut all trade down shortly after tar became known in the archipelago.  Without his son Stoik had changed, and the controlled, measured man who had cared about economic growth and the cost of wheat wasn’t there anymore.  After Valka had died a shock of bloody wars ripped across the archipelago, punitive actions that became bitter conflicts, and Stoik the Vindictive had been a man who’s banner struck fear in the hearts of soldiers.  Some had feared a similar outbreak with the death of his son, but aside from sabre rattling and a few rough clashes with the Berserkers the Berkian tribe had been silent. 

The affect tar had on the market was incredible.  While essentials suffered only a slight dip, luxury items like the ones that he specialized in were suddenly not in the budget.  There were still sales, certainly, but Johann was tired of watching his brethren prosper while he was struggling by on custom orders and cheap sales to teenage girls.  He’d sailed to the dragonhunter port with chipped paint on his prow and a submissive, groveling smile, waving heartily to the man who managed customs and inventory as he stood on the planks watching him.  He was a brute of a man, like most dragon hunters, but standing on the boards with a clipboard and bored expression took most of the threat out of him.

“What’s your name.” the man called dully as Johann threw a rope at the dock, missing once and having to reel it in again to make another go at tying her up.

“I’m Trader Johann!” he called back theatrically.  “Purveyor of fine goods and one of a kind items, procured from far away lands at great personal—”

“What’s in the hold.” The man interrupted, sounding irritated now as well as bored.  “I need a manifest.”

Johann fidgeted slightly.  “Ah, well, see, my stock changes so often it’s not really reasonable to keep a detailed manifest of every single item—”

The man sighed like Johann had just told him the ship was full of spiders packed in manure.  “Well then we get to spend the day doing your inventory.  Yay us.” He said, tone resigned but bitter.  “Hold up, I’m coming aboard.”

The man made Johann’s small ship rock slightly as he climbed up the netting, hopping up onto deck and adjusting his brimmed hat.  He was a good foot taller than Johann, and might have been alarming if not for the fantastically bored expression on his face.  The man looked like even a blow to the face with a hammer wouldn’t budge his expression.  He was also completely sober, which was more than he could say for any of the other dragon hunters he’d seen the past few months.

Johann led the man down into the hold of the ship, where in the dim light the wares that made up Johann’s ‘treasure’ were packed and crammed together in no particular order.  As it was his own ship he didn’t have to bother making it possible for anyone else to find anything, and had his own strange system for organizing goods based on demand and location.  The man sighed heartily and walked towards the mess, stooping to open  the first chest he came upon.  Johan wrung his hands anxiously.

“Perhaps not that particular chest to start with…”

Too late.  The man had opened the top and knelt staring blankly at the contents of the chest. 

“That’s a lot of dildos.” The man said, sounding neither impressed nor alarmed.  Johann wiped a hand down his face.

“Ah, I can explain—”

“Don’t care.” The man interrupted, and began marking something down on the clipboard.  “Not gonna sell very well, though.  The men came back from the last hunting trip two days ago.  Not a lot of lonely wives right now.”

Johann perked up slightly.  “So the hunters are in port?  Are the Grimborn brothers with them?”

The man barely glanced up. “Yeah.  You got business?”

Johann cleared his throat.  “I was hoping to discuss with the misusers Grimborne about taking on a distributary position within their operation.”

The man snorted.  “Yeah, you and everyone else.  Funny how everyone likes us now that we supply the tar.”

 

It was mid afternoon by the time Johann  made it onto land, and  the summer sun had baked the streets and chased many of the people indoors.  The market was in a wide, open area near the docks, where the ground was covered with cobblestones and a cracked stone wall sheltered the vendors from sea breeze.  There were a handful of stalls still waiting passively in the heat, brightly colored tents and awnings faded in the sun, and an irritable looking young boy with a goat stood at the entrance of the marketplace, demanding if anyone wanted any god damned milk.  It was not the most promising first impression. 

There was a busker with a fiddle next to a stall selling glass pipes.  The stall sat under a blue awning tucked against the wall of the market, with a large, frowning woman standing behind it, arms crossed over her stomach.  He wandered closer, pretending to be listening to the black eyed boy’s music.  He watched Johann warily as he came closer, but then he dropped a few pennies in his cup and the boy relaxed, letting him hover nearby as he sawed his way through a long, wailing ballad. 

The woman selling the pipes glared at him, but seemed to soften as he gave her his most winning smile and pulled off his cap.

“This glass is beautiful workmanship, is your husband the craftsman?” he asked.

The woman shifted.  “I am.  Ain’t got no husband.”

Johann feigned astonishment.  “A veritable rose such as yourself?  My dear, I believe we must have a case of pearls before swine, as it were.  Clearly these uncivilized ruffians cannot appreciate a woman of your…stature.”

She clearly didn’t buy it, but he saw her expression soften a bit, the corners of her mouth turning up momentarily.

“Allright, what do you want.” She said.

Johann offered her a dazzling smile.  “Oh, many things.  But I have been trying to get into contact with someone involved in the distribution of razorwhip tar for the dragonhunters.”

She snorted. “Fat luck.  Try Ryker.  I hear he’s a little more easygoing than the other guy.”

“Ah, many thanks, my delicate flower.  And where would I find him?”

The woman pointed over the wall, towards the sprawling streets beyond.  “Little brick house, about twenty red chickens running around in front.” She said.  “Roses all over the front.  You can’t miss it.”

Roses?  Ryker had never stuck him as a man who gardened, much less tended flowers.  Maybe he had a wife in port.  It would make sense, since no man in his right mind would bring a wife along to hunt dragons.  Johann took the woman’s hand and kissed her knuckles reverently.  “Thank you my dear.  You know,” he leaned in conspiratorially “I’ll be in port for the night.  Would you care to stop by my ship, perhaps we can exchange our thoughts on the current market?”

“I’d rather fuck.” The woman said bluntly.

Johann blinked at her, then a genuine grin stretched across his face.  “I’m sure that can be arranged.”

 

With his night already looking brighter, the rest of the market seemed worth at least looking into.  Even if the Grimborne’s said no to letting him edge into the market he might be able to suss out some need of the dragon hunters that was currently going unmet.  Johann didn’t compete in the market by having the best prices or the most goods, he competed by being the only one who was willing to openly trade in ‘strange and exotic’ goods there on the dock.  All cultures had taboos, and it was his great privilege to exploit them at every turn to make a few pennies while still keeping the respect of the common populace.

Most of the stall attendants were fidgety, clearly ready to move on with their day, but either lack of sales or scheduling kept them at their posts.  A few dozen people, mostly women with market baskets, moved placidly between the stalls like cattle, and he mumbled his apologies as he moved through them. 

There was a gronkle standing in the market.  Johann stopped himself and took a few steps back, peering down the narrow corridor between stalls to make sure his eyes hadn’t deceived him.  It was honestly a gronkle, on the runty side with an unpleasant bluish patina that made it look ill.  It was facing away from him, attention absorbed by a conversation that seemed to be going on between two thin men standing in front of it.

Johann frowned, openly staring now.  One of the men wasn’t standing in front of the gronkle.  The one facing him, a rail thin man with a grey beard, was holding up something small and white that moved in the sunlight.  The one facing away had short brown hair, thin shoulders, and was wearing a white shirt with a brown leather vest buckled over it.  There was something odd about his belt, an overcomplicated thing with too many buckles that seemed to run straps down his hips towards his knees—

Except that was what was bothering him about this picture.  The brown haired man was not standing in FRONT of the gronkle, that was merely a trick of perspective.  The straps ran down his legs and attached to the gronkle’s leather saddle with green metal carabiners, holding him in it, because there was nothing to the man from the pelvis down.  He simply stopped at the hip.  He knew he shouldn’t be staring, since after all very few made it through life without losing a little something here and there along the way, but the sight seemed to niggle at him as he watched.  The legless man reached out his hands to take whatever the squirming white thing was, and he thought something seemed familiar about the way he moved, like he’d known him once long ago.

He turned slightly to look down at whatever it was he held cradled in his arms, and Johann’s pulse picked up a little, sure he had it wrong.  Of course he looked familiar, he’d seen him grow up from a little slip of a thing to the prince who’d taken on the Red Death.  The effortlessly tousled brown hair, the small frame, it looked like….well, it looked like Hiccup Haddock, dragon rider and the heartthrob of young girls all across the archipelago.  Except Hiccup had been dead for almost a year now. 

Realizing he was being conspicuous, Johann moved to the side of the aisle, pretending to consider the stall selling studded war clubs in barrels.  Trading in arms was not really his style, though he’d once sold a trebuchet to the outcasts by lashing it to the deck of his ship and praying it didn’t capsize.  He kept an eye on them, moving one stall up and trying to listen for what they were talking about. 

He could just make out the bearded man’s voice, chopped by the noise of the crowd.

“—last one we could find.  The demand for these has been high these past months, it will cost a little more than we originally agreed upon.”

Johann rolled his eyes despite himself.  It wasn’t even a subtle tactic.  Where was the fines, the pride in ripping a man off so thoroughly he never even realized he’d been taken? 

The boy spoke, but his voice brought only anxiety to Johann’s ears.  It was a rough voice, one of a man who smoked more than was good for him, and the harsh rasp made it difficult to place.  It was familiar, sure, but not enough to decide one way or the other.

“I only brought what we talked about.” He said, rocking the bundle gently.  It made a small sound.  What on earth were they trading?

The man grinned.  “Perhaps we could arrange some other form of payment.  A fair exchange.”

“How about you let me have him for the price we agreed or I tell Viggo you just tried to hit me up.”

Johann had to look to see the man’s expression.  His mouth was hanging open, eyes wide in his head, and Johann had to admit he was a little entertained by the exchange.

“I—I did not such thing!” the man protested.  “I was thinking more along the lines of information—”

“Yeah, no.” the boy interrupted him.  “Now I’m definitely telling Viggo.  That you tried to hit me up to get information on him.  He’ll love that.”

The man was sweating.  The boy was a bit of a shark, wasn’t he.

“Is there…anyway I can smooth over this misunderstanding?” he said smoothly.

The  boy seemed to think about it.  He wished he could see his face, anything more than the back of him.

“Yeah.” The boy said thoughtfully.  “I’ll be taking him, and I think I’ve earned a discount.  How’s twenty percent?  I pay you twenty percent, I mean.”

He could see the man quickly do up the math before balking.  “That’s barely going to cover the import taxes alone!”

The boy shrugged, and shifted the bundle up onto his shoulder.  Johann saw two tiny blue eyes in a white face, and realized it was some sort of dragon they were talking about.  It was only about the size of a small cat, bone white with yellowish streaks on its scales.  What species it was he had no idea.

“If you don’t like it, you can talk to Viggo about it.” He said, and the man’s expression turned sullen and stormy.

“Fine, twenty percent.” He spat.

The boy tossed a small pouch to him, and he caught it in the air, not even bothering to count it.  He stood glaring as the boy began to baby talk the small dragon, tickling its chin.

The voice that split the marketplace had no problem carrying over the sounds of the crowd.  From somewhere to his left a man was bellowing “Hiccup!  Where’s your scrawny ass!”

He saw the boy jolt and look up, quickly hiding the baby dragon against the saddle.  The gronkle turned towards the voice, turning the boy, but only enough for Johann to see the line of his jaw.

“I’m over here!” he called back.

A moment later an enormous man parted the crowd and pushed his way to the pair.  The man who’d brought the dragon disappeared quite neatly, and Johann recognized the broad frame of Ryker Grimborne, glaring down at the boy.  He was, counter intuitively, carrying a small woven market basket with a cloth on top, a small bundle of dried lavender sticking out from underneath.  To make matter’s worse there was a white rose pinned onto his tunic, losing petals here and there, like he hadn’t paid any attention to it since it had been pinned on. 

Anxious of being spotted now, Johann slipped between stalls and peered out, earning him an odd look from a child who seemed to have no attending parent, standing in the path in dirty feet with a piece of candy sticking out of his mouth.  He didn’t catch what Hiccup said in return, but he held up the little white animal like it was some sort of prize, showing it to Ryker.  The man looked unimpressed.

As the two began to move away Johann pressed his back to a post, taking deep breaths to calm his fluttering pulse.  It was impossible, Hiccup and his Nigttfury had gone down with the rest of the dragon riders last summer.  The bodies of most of the dragons had been recovered, the sea needing to take it’s time to wear apart such large creatures, but only the Hofferson girl had been recovered.  Well, and part of the Ingerman boy.  Stoik had burnt the best ships of his fleet when he’d brought them back, and apparently the Jorgenson boy’s father had burnt their house with everything inside it in a drunken grief.  The fire had spread to a nearby property and what had been a funeral now turned into a disaster as the flames were visible from Berserker island.

If Hiccup was alive…this changed everything. 

 

Johann had completely forgotten about the woman.  He’d been pacing the deck of his ship, trying to decide what to do, when a rock winged through the air in front of him.  He stopped, blinking at it, and looked around to try to find the thrower.  The woman from the marketplace was standing on the dock next to the ship, weighing another stone in her hand.  She was a great wall of a women, built wide and sturdy, and the bodice she was wearing made the most of her particular attributes.

He made himself smile, putting on his salesman face.  “My dear, I had so hoped you would come by!”

“Enid.” She said, by way of introduction.

Johan repeated it back.  “Enid.” He said, like it was an exotic delight.  “Come aboard, come aboard.  Would you care for a drink?”

“Don’t drink.” The woman said simply, jumping the gap between the boat and the dock quite handily.  She was an impressive beast if nothing else, and while big girls weren’t really what he liked they were plentiful in the archipelago and usually bored with their husbands.  Married ones carried fewer risks, like coming back around next circuit and finding her standing on the dock with a baby in her arms. 

“It does dull the senses.” He shrugged.  “Perhaps I could interest you in some other refreshment?”

Her gaze was dull but no nonsense.  “Not interested.  You got a cabin on this thing?”

Johan felt himself grin.  “I do.”

 

Another amazing attribute he found in the big woman was a refreshing unconcernedness with social mores and reputation.  By the time they were bored enough to go for Johann, they were no longer so concerned with seduction, merely performance, and he liked to think it was without pride that he knew he could deliver.  It was some time later, well into the night, and activities had moved into the hold.  The woman, Enid, was sprawled nude on an expensive rug he’d unrolled, her thick body decorated with cheap paste jewelry he sold to men looking to impress either young girls or their mistresses.  No one ever bought paste for their wives.

Still, it made her glitter in the candlelight, a ‘gold’ necklace set with heavy green glass stones hanging between her breasts.  She didn’t seem in any hurry to move, watching Johann’s naked rear as he stood nearby packing tobacco into a small wooden pipe.  He wasn’t normally a big smoker, but he liked the effect of it after sex.  It was almost a ritual.

He came back and sat next to her hip, puffing the pipe to get it going, and she sat up, watching him curiously.  He offered it to her, and to his surprise she took it, biting the stem and sucking in a deep lungful of tobacco smoke.  He blew it out in his face, making him flinch slightly.

“You staying in port long?” she asked, rolling the pipe to the other side of her mouth. 

Johann shook his head.  “I don’t believe so, my dear.  Business calls.”

‘Hm.” She took another drag, holding it in for a moment before letting it out slowly, the smoke jetting past Johann’s shoulder and fogging the room.  “Talk to Ryker yet?”

Oh right.  Obtaining a distribution contract had been the furthest thing from his mind.

“Not yet.” He said.  “I did see him in the market, though.  He was with a … a boy riding a blue gronkle.  Do you know who that was?”

Enid frowned.  “Him?  The legless kid?”

“Well yes, I do believe he was missing a few pieces.” He allowed lamely.

Enid just shrugged.  “He’d nothing of Ryker’s.  I don’t know em that well, just see em around town, but that kid lives over with the other one, Viggo.  Started seeing him out in a cart a few months ago, Viggo pushing him around, then he got that gronkle.  Names something weird, like Belch or Toenail or something.”

“Hiccup?” Johann offered lightly.

The woman nodded.  “Yeah, that’s him.  Why?  You know him?”

“I used to.” He admitted.  “I doubt he would recognize me.  Do you know what happened?  He had quite a bit more to him last I saw him.”

Enid shrugged. “The hell would I know.  Go ask him yourself, if you want.  He’s in that creepy house Viggo lives in, never goes out if the dragon hunters aren’t in port.  Buy’s a lot of candy at the market.” She added, not quite helpfully.

Johann frowned. “It’s been a long time, I’m sure my presence would be an intrusion.” He lied.

“Then stop talking about him.” She said, grabbing the end of his beard and pulling his face close to hers.  “I got a better use for all that nervous energy.”

Johann laughed uneasily “I’m afraid I’ll need a little longer before we, er, begin again, I’m not quite as young as I used to be—”

She yanked his head down by the beard, shoving him down between her legs.  That shut him up.

 

Viggo’s expression was not encouraging.

The man was standing in his kitchen, holding the wriggling little white dragon at arms length.  It was round and potbellied, like a puppy, with rounded little nubs of horns and a pink, gaping mouth.

“I was gonna name her Rosebud.” Tuff continued.  “’Cause your mom likes roses, and he’s kinda the same color as that big bush in front of her house.  Either that or Farfenblargin.”

Tuff was still in the gronkle’s saddle, and the dragon was flopped on its belly on the cool stone floor, making him shorter than he liked.

“You do realize the bite of a Hollowtooth is extremely poisonous.” Viggo said blandly. “One bite leaves a person dead within six minutes, and it’s a rather painful method of death.  It disintegrates the victim from the inside.”  He turned to raise an eyebrow at Tuff.  “And you want to give it to my mother.”

Tuff rolled his eyes.  “Okay, one, I’m not a complete moron, so yeah, I know they’re dangerous.  But not until they’re like three years old.  This little gal just hatched, she’s got no teeth, the worst she could do is pee on the rug.  She’s gonna think your mommy is her mommy and bite anyone who tries to hurt her.” He said, crossing his arms smugly.  “And what did YOU get her anyway, huh?  Is it better than a dragon?”

Viggo thrust the mewling baby back at Tuff, who took it in his arms and began rocking it like it were a human baby.  “I’m simply going to spend the evening at her house, as I do every year.” Viggo said irritably.

Tuff’s expression looked equally unimpressed, but moreso, judging.  “Wow.  Really.” He said flatly.  “You’re gonna make her cook you dinner on her birthday.  That is weak sauce, Viggo.  Do not enter that sauce in the competition, for it will not win.”

Viggo gestured at him irritably. “My mother doesn’t need anything.  Besides, spending time together matters for something, doesn’t it?”

Tuff snorted. “Yeah, if we were little babies playing baby games.  On your birthday your mother knitted you a sweater.  You left on your hunting trip with it on under your armor and you were still wearing it when you came back.  I had to wash that thing like three times, it was nasty, so don’t you try to give me any of that ‘my mommy doesn’t need a present.’ “ he finished in a high mocking falsetto.  Viggo crossed his arms, glaring, and Tuff secretly loved that sulky expression.  He never made it in front of anyone else except his mother and Ryker.

“And what, pray tell, do you suggest?” he asked in cool, clipped tones.  “It’s a little late to start working on something.”

Tuff rolled his eyes. “You know, weird little gadgets aren’t the only thing you can give as a gift.  You can give people other things.  Nice things.”

Viggo’s eyes narrowed into a grumpy frown, rising to the bait too easily.  On Snoggletog Viggo had given Tuff this weird little device that you turned the crank and a little door opened, a small mechanical bird popped out, and pecked you in the hand.  It was the most useless and hilarious thing he’d ever seen.  He had in short order hurt himself, broken it, tried to bury the evidence, and been betrayed by his gronkle, Fnord, who had dug it up from the backyard and dumped it on the bed while they were sleeping. 

“This year, I think you should cook your mom dinner.  You owe her, she’s made us cookies like every day since I got here.” Tuff said, playing with the dragon’s tiny toes. 

“I don’t cook.” Viggo responded flatly.

“Yeah, I know.” Tuff snipped.  “I’ve been feeding you for like three months.  Seriously, dude, you’re like what, 35?  Don’t you think it’s time you learn to do a few things for yourself?”

And there it was, the perfect, complete grumpy pout, his shoulders hunched up around his ears and lower lip sticking out ever so slightly.  Tuff couldn’t help but grin, and leaned forward, shouldering Viggo in the ribs.

“I’ll help.” He assured, tone softer, and he saw Viggo relax a little.  “Besides, you know I can’t leave you alone around the stove.  You’ll burn this whole place down.”

Viggo tilted his head, eyes narrow, and tried an obvious redirect.  “You don’t expect that thing to sleep with us tonight, do you.”

Because he was feeling generous, Tuff allowed it.  “Maybe.  I mean, she is a little baby and all.  Why, you got ideas?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows at Viggo.

Viggo ignored the innuendo, as usual.  “She can sleep in the stable with Fnord.”

“Ugh.  You’re such a grumpy old man.” Tuff wrinkled his nose, bouncing the baby dragon to make it chirrup.  He tickled it’s chin adoringly.  “Isn’t he.  Isn’t Uncle Viggo a grumpy old man.” He cooed to it.  “Can you say ‘grumpy’?”

The baby dragon burbled. 

“Yeah!  Say ‘Viggo is a grumpy old man’.  Come on.”

Viggo rolled his eyes theatrically.  “They can not talk, Hiccup.”

Tuff flashed him a grin.  “Sure she can, come here, listen.”  He held the dragon up in front of his face, obscuring his mouth, and said in a high, babyish voice “My name is Rosebud, and I’m just a little baby.  Just a widdle iddy biddy baby.  Mean ol Uncle Viggo isn’t gonna make me sleep out in the cold with granite breath, is he?”

Viggo was leveling the most unamused stare he could muster, daring Tuff to continue making a fool of himself.  Tuff did, holding the dragon out inches from Viggo’s face.  There were spit bubbles at the corners of its mouth and it was looking at him with wide, disgustingly innocent curiosity.

“I don’t like being cold.   Because I’m just an iddy.”  He pushed the infant closer.  “Biddy.’ Even closer, a spit bubble mere inches from Viggo’s face. He didn’t move.  “Baby.”  Tuff closed the gap, pressing the baby dragon’s muzzle against Viggo’s stubbled cheek, popping the spit bubble against his skin.  The man recoiled with a disgusted sound, wiping at his face.

“And that’s supposed to make me let it sleep inside?” he demanded, taking a step back, knowing that Fnord wouldn’t get up to move him closer. 

“No, but look at this cute little baby face.  All round and cute and innocent.  See?”  He held it up next to his face, trying to imitate the dragon’s expression.  He did a disturbingly good job, actually, eyes wide and mouth open in an astonished o. 

Viggo gave a frustrated huff.  “Fine!  Fine, it can sleep in the bedroom!  But not on the bed!” he  stuck a finger in Tuff’s face, waggling it.  “And if that thing makes a mess you’ll be the one cleaning it up.”

Tuff laughed, and darted forward to kiss Viggo’s wagging finger.  The man pulled it back like he’d been burned, hiding it behind his back.  “Yeah, who else would?” he grinned.

 

Rosebud didn’t sleep on the floor that night.  She’d cried from the foot of the bed until Tuff had started imitating her, and a frustrated Viggo put his pillow over his head.  Within minutes she was sandwiched between them, burbling happily.


	9. Home

“What makes you so sure it was a trap?” Gobber asked, leaning back and tilting the chair he was sitting on so it stood on two legs.

Stoik turned to him, glaring darkly. “It WAS a trap.”

Gobber held up his hands submissively.  “I’m not questioning your judgement, Chief.” He assured.  “I’m just asking.”

For a long moment Stoik glared at him.  Gobber was very aware that he was treading on unstable ground.  That was precisely his job, however, and stayed carefully relaxed and open, trying not to look confrontational.

It had been over an hour since they abandoned Spitelout to his cups.  When they’d come back from the mission he’d been over the moon, singing that annoying song and doing loops on his dragon, but once they returned to Berk (or the scorched ruin that was left of Berk) his mood soured again and he sacked out in the Great Hall, trying to drain a barrel of mead by himself

They’d blown the ship found abandoned at the edge of Berserker territory sky high, taking it’s cargo with it.  It had apparently been a food supply ship Dagur had lost.  For a moment it had seemed like they wouldn’t have to push their raid all the way onto the Berserker island after all, but the ship was too perfect, unaffected by storm or dragon fire.  With no clear reason for being abandoned Stoik had caught scent of a trap, and ordered it destroyed from the air.

They’d ended up striking their city instead.  The haul was enough to last a few days, but the dried meat and potatoes on the ship would have lasted longer. 

“You saw the ship.” Stoik growled.  “Not a rope out of place.  There’s no reason to abandon a supply ship so close to our boarders UNLESS it’s a trap.”

Gobber shifted.  That would make sense if the Berserkers had put up an honest fight when they reached the island, but the entire place had seemed to be abandoned, their storehouses almost empty.  They’d taken what they could fit on their dragons and flown back, oddly unmolested.  “I don’t suppose their wee chief could have left it there as an offering, do you?”

Bad move.  Stoik flared.  “We are at war with the Berserkers!  Dagur isn’t sending us little gifts, Gobber.” He sneered.

Gobber shrugged.  “Just saying.  Five years ago we’d have had the armada at our door after the first raid.  This is pretty tame, for Dagur.”

“He’s probably up to something.” Stoik grumbled, clasping his hands behind his back and beginning to pace again.  “He’s not a boy anymore, he’s become more calculating.  I would bet anything he’d hiding down in those caves, probably outfitting the fleet.”

Gobber refrained from rolling his eyes.  “That he might.  Might also just be hiding.”

Stoik stopped again, turning to glare at his friend.  “Do you have a problem with the way I’m handling things?” he asked dangerously.

“No, no, never have, chief, and I never will.”  Gobber let his chair thump back onto four legs and stood, holding up his hands submissively as he moved slowly towards Stoik, expression placid and disarming.  When he lay a hand on Stoik’s shoulder the man glanced to it, then to him, before his glare softened only enough for Gobber to notice. 

“It’s been a long day.” Gobber said, tone softer.  “You need to relax, get out of your head a little bit.”  He squeezed his friend’s shoulder and leaned in conspiratorially.  “You know, I think a little boar wrestling might be just the ticket to wear you out.  I have it on good authority the boar pit’s going unused this time of night.”

Stoik looked away irritably.  “I’m not in the mood to go out catching wild boars, Gobber.” He huffed.

“Then forget the boars, they were a euphemism anyway.”

That got him the slow, diplomatic blink Stoik gave in official company, while the man prcessed a reaction.

“Oh, come on.  I suppose we could always do it here, but anybody could come barging in.” he said, guesturing to the door.  Stoik looked at it, half expecting someone to do just that, but it remained closed.

“Gobber, I’m…tired.” He said lamely, looking not at his friend but past his shoulder.

“That’s why you’re up all night pacing?”  Gobber smirked, and used his hook to turn Stoik’s head to face him.  His wooden leg creaked against the floorboards as he shifted forward another step, bringing himself almost nose to nose with the man.

The diplomatic unreadability of Stoik’s expression was legendary, but most it softened slightly, the ghost of something hollow and howling drifting behind his eyes.  Gobber had seen it before, when Valka died.  He’d gotten him through it then, and he was getting him through this now.  He held Stoik’s face still firmly with his hand and leaned in, pressing his lips to his in a familiar kiss.  Stoik didn’t kiss back, but when he pulled away the deep lines around his friend’s eyes had softened, and his age showed through his frame.

Twenty years of practice meant they both heard the footsteps pounding their way down the cobblestones of the street, and by the time Sven slammed into the door of Stoik’s house and burst it open Gobber was in his seat, leaning idly back, and Stoik was glowering from in front of the fire.  Gobber shot him smug “see?” with his eyes.

“What is it, Sven.” Stoik growled dangerously.  Sven swallowed, face pale and trembling a little, and stumbled towards Stoik, grabbing his sleeve. 

“It’s Trader Johann.  You’ve got to come, Stoik.’ He babbled, succeeding in dragging the man only because Stoik allowed it.  Gobber got to his feet.

“What is it, has he been attacked?” Stoik asked, running out after him into the night.  “Is he in port?”

He could hear Gobber’s footsteps behind them and didn’t turn to look.  Sven was leading them towards the docks at speed.  “He just came in, and he’s got news!  It’s Hiccup!”

Stoik stopped dead on the cobbles and Gobber ran into his back, knocking him forward a step.  In the dark Stoik was a great ominous shape, hulking against the jagged, blackened shantytown that had risen on the burnt foundations.  When he spoke his voice was dangerous, a dark rumble that made both men take a step bacl.

“What about Hiccup?”

Sven turned to face him, mouth working for a moment like a fish.  When he finally spoke it was in a whisper, looking anxiously towards the Great Hall like he feared being overheard.

“He says he’s alive.”

 

The sea bleached boards of the pier creaked under Johann’s feet as he turned and started the walk back up towards the land.  At this time of day the fishing boats were out to sea and the market had closed, leaving him almost alone on the dock, his brightly bannered ship bobbing idly on the waves.  It had been some years since Berk had looked like this.  In the summer sun the island was once again a village of huts and tents, having been burned to the ground by the now legendary Jorgenson grief some time back.  Fields still grew stubby vegetables here and there, but the dry weather hadn’t helped their situation.  Johann usually tried to make a point to stock up on cured meats, cheeses, and potatoes before coming to port, though today there were nothing but his own personal supplies, the famine the furthest thing from his mind.

He could have sworn the ground shook as the Viking chief came rolling out like a thunderhead, eating the ground between the Great Hall and the dock, Gobber and Spitelout trailing along behind him.  He briefly debated jumping in his ship and sailing away, but Stoik would catch him regardless.  He made himself stand tall and wait as the man descended upon him, Stoik looming larger and larger until the man grabbed Johann by the collar and lifted him off the ground.  “Talk.” He ordered.

Johann forced a winning smile.  “Chief Stoik, it’s certainly a pleasure to see you again, I have just returned from my solo journey around—”

Stoik shook him roughly, momentarily scrambling him.

“Right!  Right!  Hiccup!” he babbled.  “I have fortuitous news!  I was just last week passing through the Faroe Islands on business and happened upon a queer sight in the marketplace.  There I was, perusing the wares of this delicate native rose, and stroking up quite a conversation, I might add—”

Stoik began shaking him again, and Johann yelped in protest.

“Either way to make a long story short!” he shouted.  “A boy!  A boy on a gronkle was in the marketplace, brown hair, thin frame, the spitting image of Hiccup!  I thought for certain my grief filled eyes had deceived me, but who should come walking out of the crowd but Ryker himself.  He called the boy by name! I fear he has been taken hostage by the dragon hunters, injured, but alive!”

It was the most succinct Johann had ever been with Stoik.  All three men gaped at him a moment, then he saw Gobber turn his face to Stoik.  All ignored Spitelout, who let out an odd rush of air and bent down, putting his hands on his knees.

“He’s with Ryker? Stoik said, and Johann nodded, swallowing.  “Why is Ryker at the Faroe Islands?”

Johann chuckled nervously. “That is where the dragon hunters return to port each circuit.” He explained apologetically.  “Their base of operations, if you will.  I saw him purchasing a small dragon from a gentleman who did not enjoy their transaction.  He was…Stoik, he’s been injured.” He babbled.  “Both legs were completely missing, he was tied onto the saddle of a gronkle that was too small to fly him.”

“How long ago?” Stoik demanded.

Johann swallowed.  “Seven days.”

Abruptly Stoik let go of Johann, making him fall onto the boards with a yelp.

“Gobber, get the dragons.” Stoik snapped, the order carrying a heat behind it Gobber hadn’t heard in years.  He snapped off a ‘Yes, Chief!” and started back towards the village at a run.

Spitelout reached out and caught Johann’s sleeve.  “Was there anyone else?” he asked desperately, and for a moment Johann didn’t understand what he meant, until he saw the brittle look in his eyes and realized he meant his son.  He wanted to know if his son had miraculously reappeared too.

Johann stammered a moment, then managed an apology.  He saw the fire in Spitelout’s eyes dim again and the man let him go.

Spitelout’s eyes slowly turned towards Stoik.  “Should I gather the auxiliary riders?”

Stoik shook his head. “No time.  We’ll go alone, you, me, and Gobber.  Trader Johann, you can ride with me.”

Johann put his hands up placatingly. “While I surely appreciate the invitation, Chief Stoik, I must be moving on to the next port on my list—”

“You’re coming with.” Stoik growled.  “Because if we get to the Faroe Islands and Hiccup isn’t there, I want you on hand to explain it to me,”

Johann gulped and forced his most appeasing smile.  “Of course.”

 

Of all the terrible ideas his brother had ever had, this had to be one of the worst.

Ryker had done the usual, rising and going to do his mother’s marketing, returning with flowers and a small box of candies for her birthday.  She’d been appreciative as ever, and from then until sundown Ryker had been forced to hover in the side yard, looking over the trees for any sign of smoke from Viggo’s house.  Every now and then their mother would wander out to stand next to him, watching the trees, before patting his arm and moving back inside.

Cooking wasn’t something Viggo should try to learn.  He wasn’t even completely sure the stove in his kitchen was hooked up to the chimney, or if the boy had been feeding him out of the forge.  He’d been paranoid ever since the cookies had started to go uneaten that Viggo would try to cook for himself and burn down half the town.

Come sundown his mother had come out to fetch him, wearing her good green dress with the late summer roses braided into her greying hair.  He’d stared a moment, dumbfounded, before she took his arm and tugged him gently towards the street. 

It was unreal to see Viggo’s house illuminated, the curtains drawn back and the walkway swept.  His mother squeezed his arm, either from delight or in reassurance, and he let her pull ahead of him.  As her feet climbed the steps he heard the door swing open and saw her silhouetted there, the golden light from Viggo’s kitchen carrying with it the smell of burnt chicken and thyme, and the sound of pots clattering in the sink.  Viggo stood at the door, in a clean shirt with a trimmed beard, smiling awkwardly with pupils the size of pinpricks.  Behind him Tuff was at the sink, perched on a stool with his hands in the water as he scrubbed at the blackened roasting pan.  The kitchen table (now with four chairs, one on each side) was set with painstakingly even plates and cutlery, and resting in the center was an improvised platter with a small, blackened bird in the middle of it.  It had been aggressively dressed with parsley and thyme, and was surrounded by a bed of leathery looking potatoes.  On one of the chairs was a picnic hamper, tied shut with twine.

“Good evening, Mother.”  Viggo said placidly.  “Happy Birthday.”

 “Rosie!” Tuffnut called from the sink, pushing the pan down under the water and abandoning it to soak.  “Rosie, Baby, Doll, happy big five three!” he hooted.

Viggo let his mother hug him, not hugging back but at least not squirming away this time, and stepped aside so she could pass into the kitchen.  Tuff put his arms up enthusiastically and Rosie hugged him, squeezing him so hard she lifted him off the stool for a moment.  Her face was pink and smiling broadly, not the wet smile she usually wore but a wide, genuine one.

Ryker still stood gawking on the walkway, and Viggo raised an eyebrow at him.

“Coming, brother?”

Ryker shook his head to clear it and started forward, muttering under his breath.

“Your present’s in that basket.” Tuff chirped, gripping the edge of the stool and swinging himself down to the floor. He kept talking as he crossed the short distance between the sink and the kitchen table on the palms of his hands, hips barely clearing the ground. “You should hurry up and open it before she claws her way out.”

Rose stood at the chair and stared down at the basket, casting Tuff a suspicious glance.  Viggo had moved to the table and stood behind his chair, gripping the back of it tightly and watching the interaction of the only people he loved, not sure why his mother hugging Tuff should make his stomach squirm.  She reached down to hesitantly pull the tail of the twine, the basket shifting slightly at the sound, and as it fell away the top of the basket lifted, a little white snout sticking its way out from inside and sniffing the air.  Rose cautiously lifted it off its head and gasped, it’s pug, babyish features and bright blue eyes making it look more like a stuffed toy than an animal.  Her eyes darted to Viggo, questioning, and he drew himself up slightly.

“It’s a Hollowtooth.” He said.  “They’re an extremely venomous dragon from the orient, where they’ve been domesticated to serve as protection for the elite.  Wealthy women in China carry them in their sleeves to protect against would be attackers.”  He left out that Tuff had ‘borrowed’ an enormous amount of money from his stash in the cellar to buy this particular dragon, unaware that the money had not gone to the seller after all.

“Yeah!” Tuff chirped, hauling himself up into his chair.  “Don’t worry, though, she’s totally harmless right now, won’t get her venom in until later.  Right, Rosebud?” he cooed, then aside “I named her Rosebud by the way, hope that isn’t weird.”

Rose beamed and reached out to show her hand to the creature, letting it sniff her. 

“I was thinking this way,” Tuff babbled, pupils small. “When the boys are away hunting there’d still be someone home to protect you.  That way they wouldn’t have to worry and I wouldn’t have to worry because lets face it, if anything happens, by the time I make my way over to your place to beat the guy with my awesome Kung Fu skills you’ll be dead and stuffed in the outhouse, so yeah…”

Both Grimborne brothers were glaring at him disapprovingly, an expression he was very familiar with, but Rose was completely unaffected.  She lifted the round little dragon out of its basket and set it on her hip like an infant.  It burbled and goggled up at her, toothless and drooling.

‘Shall we?” Viggo asked crisply, pulling back his chair and taking a seat.  Ryker scrambled to pull out their mother’s chair and she sat, beaming and bouncing the dragon gently on her thigh. 

 

While not the most inedible meal any of them had ever choked down, it was far from good, which was the only thing that convinced Ryker his brother had actually cooked it.  The bird had been burnt to the point he wanted to scrape it with his knife, and yet the bones were somehow still pinkish.  The whole meal had been oversalted and tasted like nothing edible, but they all sat and ate it, like a grim duty, forks conveying strips of salted charcoal to their mouths.  Rose still looked pleased with the meal, her face a fixed radiant beacon of love and light that was making both boys a little uncomfortable.

When they’d choked back every awful piece, and Ryker was leaning back in his chair with his arms over his stomach, grimacing, Rose stood and set the dragon down on her chair, stepping across to where Viggo sat anxiously watching her.  She put her arms around his neck and gently kissed the thin spot on the top of his head, where he would never admit he was balding.

‘Mom?” Viggo asked nervously, hating how childish his voice sounded.

She abruptly tightened her arms and squeezed him as hard as she could, pressing his head into her breasts and causing Viggo to shoot Ryker a panicked look, reaching up to grip her arms.  Ryker just stared at them, looking slightly amused, as she squeezed him for a good long moment, rocking him back and forth like a child.  Tuff was equally unhelpful, grinning and giving him the thumbs up sign.

Finally, she let go and Viggo leaned far away from her, eyeing her warily.  Her eyes softened with amusement and she leaned down to press a light kiss to his forehead.

 

That night, as they left for home, Rosie bent down and wrapped her arms around Tuff’s neck, hugging him.  Viggo saw her lips press to Tuffnut’s ear and her lips move, and he saw Tuffnut’s eyes go wide.

Viggo closed the door behind them and looked anxiously out the peephole, seeing them stop just outside the stoop.  The light from the lantern barely reached them, and he watched as Ryker pulled the vest off his shoulders, bending to wrap it around their mother’s thin frame.  He looked for her face anxiously, trying to see her lips, convinced they were stopping to talk about him.

She talked, he knew she talked, he’d seen her lips move, he’d seen Tuffnut’s reaction to her words.  Was this why Tuff had managed to whip up such a strong relationship with his mother so quickly?  Is this why Ryker and her still got along so well, was she really talking to everyone but him?  Childish terror seized his chest, a familiar fear he’d felt since the day of his father’s funeral that others were only lying to spare his feelings, his mother really was still talking and happy, it was only him that she couldn’t stand to speak to, him she couldn’t look at with any expression other than apologetic pity.

He saw her reach up and pat Ryker’s face.  He saw her take Ryker’s arm.  His brother led her away into the dark.

When Viggo turned around Tuff had already moved away from him, climbing up onto the stool that stood in front of the sink.  He stalked towards him as Tuff put his hands down into the water.

“What did she say?” he demanded, voice tense and even, fervent.  Tuff pursed his lips, fishing the dish brush out of the water.

“She didn’t say anything.” He decided, starting to scrub the blackened bottom of the roasting pan.

He jumped when Viggo’s hand slammed down on the edge of the sink.

“What did she SAY!” he roared, and Tuffnut jerked away from him, nearly overbalancing as terror cut through his gut like ice.  A wave of panic swelled inside him and he took a few quick breaths, trying to stave it off.  After a moment it dissipated, and he was able to give a long, slow sigh, pulling his hands out of the water.

“It’s okay.” He said quietly, wiping his hands on the front of his tunic.  When they were dry he reached out and lightly touched Viggo’s face, his skin feeling hot and damp.  Viggo’s eyes were boring into him, filling with a familiar static that sent shudders of fear through his abdomen, straight to his cock.  He hated that about himself so much. 

Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Tuff pressed his palms firmly to Viggo’s cheeks, staring right back into him, face open and calm.  After a long frightening moment the static left Viggo’s eyes, and his face relaxed just a fraction.  Tuff felt himself let out a long, slow breath, horrifyingly aware of the erection being mostly hidden by his clothing.

“It’s okay.” He said again, voice more confident, and something human came back into Viggo’s eyes.

When Viggo spoke it was with a low, growling urgency. “Just tell me what she said.  I know she spoke to you, I saw her lips move.”  He grabbed Tuff bruising by the hips, pulling him towards him on the stool and making him grab onto his shoulders for balance.  “Tell me.” He hissed.

Tuff looked up at him blankly, arms around his neck.  “Viggo.” He said softly.  “Why is this so important?”

Viggo shook him by the hip, jarring his spine painfully.  “Don’t try games with me.” He hissed.  “Is she talking to you?  Does she talk to Ryker?”  At the boy’s blank expression he shook him again, and this time the boy cried out in pain.

“Stop it!” Tuff snapped, pushing Viggo away.  “You’re being a giant baby about this, a real tantruming baby.”  He turned back to the dishes, putting his hands in the water.  “I don’t see what the big deal is.  No, she didn’t talk to me.” He lied. “She’s never talked to me.  Your mother doesn’t talk to anyone, not me, not you, not Ryker.”

He felt Viggo’s hot face press into the crook of his neck, and grimaced at the bolt of shame it sent through him.

“Is that really what you think?” he asked quietly, threading his fingers through Viggo’s short hair.  The man’s arms crept slowly around him, pressing him tight to his chest.  “Viggo.  Do you really think your mother is talking to everyone but you?  Why would you think that?”

Viggo only squeezed him tighter.  For a moment Tuff squirmed in his arms, then managed to turn himself, laying his hands gently on Viggo’s shoulders as he tried to urge the man to look up at him.

“I love you.” He said softly.  “And she loves you.  Even Ryker loves you.  Whatever you’re afraid of, you don’t have to be.”

Viggo finally turned his face up to him.  Tuff had expected him to be crying, but instead his eyes burned with a hot, pained anxiety.

“Why won’t you just tell me what she said?” he whispered, searching Tuff’s eyes for an answer.

Tuff’s eyes flickered down to his lips and he leaned in to kiss the lower one softly.  Viggo didn’t respond.  He cupped Viggo’s face adoringly, looking into his eyes and trying to see what he hid there.

“I just want you to be happy.” He whispered, tracing his fingers lightly over Viggo’s eyebrows.  “Why can’t you just be happy?”

Later, when everything was put away and they lay in the dark together, Tuff stared up at the ceiling, nervously thinking on Rosie’s visit.  He should have just told Viggo the truth and spared himself the other lies, but somehow the truth had just seemed too cruel. 

He looked down at his chest, where Viggo’s arm was clenched possessively around him, the fingers tucked under Tuff’s ribs so he couldn’t dislodge him in his sleep. 

Rosie’s breath had whispered “Thank you.” 

 

 


	10. Crucifiction

The roar of a strange dragon split the skies over the island, and every head in the market place as one lifted, looking up for the source.  Tuff pushed his hair out of his eyes and sat up, frowning, and shifting the lollipop in his mouth to the other side.  Beneath him Fnord perked up, the cobbles around him scattered with the sticks and wrappers of a dozen candies.  The gronkle was holding a rainbow colored lolly with his paws, slobbering over it. He, too, turned his face up to listen.

In the stall to his left he heard the blacksmith’s son swear and reach under his table for his crossbow, ready for just such an occasion.  On the other side the pipe seller, Enid, sighed and unbuttoned the small pouch she carried on her belt, where she kept her own kit.

“If it’s a dragon attack, they better kill em before they get here.” She said, idly and absently going about the business of heating the pipe.  Tuff and Fnord both turned to look at her, alert and eyes drawn to the kit.  Enid saw their expressions and frowned.  “What, Viggo cut you off?”

“No.’ Tuff grumbled, looking away. 

To his surprise Enid passed him the pipe anyway, and Tuff happily took it and the metal pin, dipping it in her tar pot and taking a long hit off the intricate little pipe.  He handed it back to her and he ignored her as she did the same, tapping Fnord’s head.  The gronkle looked up, chubby tail wagging, and Tuff blew a thin stream of smoke into the dragon’s upturned face.

The dragon roar came again, this time from the ground, though they hadn’t seen anything in the skies.  The only dragon attack he’d seen in the whole time he’d been on this island had been a lone monstrous nightmare, who had been dead and stripped to the bones by the time Tuff made it out to see what was going on.

“That’s not good.” Enid said blandly, smoke spilling out of her lips and trailing in her eyes.  This was the third day she’d worn that gaudy, cheap necklace, made of gold painted metal with large glass ‘emeralds’ set in it.  She said she got it from a boyfriend down at the docks but claimed ladies didn’t kiss and tell, even after Tuff volunteered to tell her about his night with Viggo.

Slowly the market began to settle back into its normal chatter and bustle, and Enid shrugged, still toying with the pipe.  Tuff sent a frown in the direction of the dragon’s roar and cautiously laid back down on Fnord’s back, head resting on his bulbous tail and mildly chewing the sucker he had in his cheek.  He’d have to go get more soon.  He still had a few pennies left over from the allowance Viggo gave him this morning, and knew the girl at the confectioners tent well enough that she’d front him a few cents for the rest.  He liked to think it was because she liked him, but the way her eyes never looked down told him in was probably pity.  Still, he’d take it. 

“The fuck is that?” Enid said, making Tuff open his eyes again.  There was a commotion near the entrance of the market, the crowd talking in a rising swell, and faces kept turning to him.

“So I know I’m really paranoid,” he said, glancing at Enid, ‘But is everybody staring at me?”

Enid leaned out of her booth, craning her neck to see.  She shrugged. “Could be.  What’d you do?”

“Nothing!” Tuff protested, but Enid snorted at him, disbelieving.  Tuff straightened and tapped Fnord’s ear, signaling him to get up.  The gronkle grumbled but obeyed, the lollypop stick and strings of hot drool coming from its mouth.  “I’m gonna go see what’s up.” He said, and nudged Fnord forward with his knees.  Enid just waved him off.

As he approached the tangled crowd he was spotted, and Olga, the barman’s daughter, seemed to draw the unspoken short straw.  She hurried across the cobbles to him, waving her hankie to flag him down.

“Hiccup!” she called, almost tripping as she came to stand before him.  “There’s a foreigner looking for you, out by the dock!  He’s got an axe!  What did you DO?”

Tuffnut flared.  “Why is everybody assuming I did something??” he protested. 

“Well did you?”

Tuff paused.  “Well yes, but nothing a foreigner would care about.” He grumbled.  Rigging the cellar door with a bucket of soapy water was not something to make a fuss over, just force Viggo to take a bath before coming to bed stinking of sweat and forge.

Olga glanced back in the direction of the docks.  “Well whatever he wants, he’s big.” She said, gesturing out the form of a hulking brute.  “And he’s really pissed.  It’s him, his friend, and two dragons.”

Tuff felt a thin shard of ice grow in his stomach.  “Dragons?” he asked lightly.

Olga was distracted.  “Yeah, like Fnord.”  She tapped the little blue runt on the nose, and Fnord wagged his tail excitedly, thrilled with any and all attention.

He didn’t know anyone who rode a gronkle.  He relaxed slightly, curiosity taking the place of that odd fear that lingered in the pit of his stomach. (and what should he be afraid of?)  When Olga started back towards the crowd Tuff followed her, shooting a look back to Enid to make sure she saw where he was going.  If something went wrong, someone would need to tell Viggo or Ryker.

As they neared the crowded entrance to the market Tuff could hear the rhythmic collision of metal and stone, and Fnord looked down warily at the ground.  Weaving through the hammering, distant and hoarse, a man was bellowing at the top of his voice, a deep, animal like roar that made Tuff’s pulse pick up.  He couldn’t make out the words.

Olga grabbed her friend’s arm and began chattering, and Tuff craned his neck to try to see over the crowd.  Fnord was not quite as tall as his legs had been, and in a crowd being at chest height was a distinct disadvantage.  He paced Fnord up and down the edge of the crowd, looking for an opening, before sighing with frustration and urging the gronkle forward, forcing Fnord to slick his ears and nudge against the legs of the man in front of them.  The man turned to glare at them, saw who it was, and immediately moved aside, pulling his friend with him.  Fnord pressed into the sea of legs and skirts like it were tall grass, Tuff beginning muttering apologies before becoming frustrated and starting to swear at people to move. 

Tuff realized that more than just the market crowd were starting to press together, but as he cleared the gates of the market he found himself mired in dock workers, burly men pressed close together and muttering confusedly to each other, bumping Tuff and making him scrabble for balance, the straps holding his waist to the saddle keeping him from being trampled underfoot.  He swore and shoved the guy back, and the man, some fisherman from a foreign port, turned his face into a mask of fury and tried to push Tuff over, not seeing what was under him.  Fnord shrieked and reared up, short legs windmilling wildly at the man and nostrils flaring, and the man shouted and stumbled back, knocking into the layman behind him. 

Fnord screamed, a shrill, painful sound, and thrashed until the area around them had cleared and Tuff was gripping the dragon’s ears for dear life.  The little gronkle huffed, wiggled himself, and began marching forward with a purpose, squealing at anyone who didn’t move out of his way.

He was getting close enough to make out the voice better, at least the distinction of words.  The familiarity of it was making anxiety bloom in his stomach, causing him to hold onto Fnord tightly as they made their slow progression forward. 

He could feel the street shake through Fnord’s saddle, each crash into stone carrying off into the distance before being lost by the roar of the sea.  The words were garbled by the noise of crowds, but he heard his name, Hiccup Haddock, bellowed out between percussions.  His chest ached and he suddenly wanted to turn around, but the paralysis of his indecision meant that Fnord kept marching onward, snarling and snorting and garbling his hearing.

He could see light through the men in front of him now.  They had come all the way to seafront, on the cobblestone road that connected the dock to the town.  Past them he could see the tall masts of ships peeking out against an endless blue summer sky.  He could smell the salt of the sea and the reek of tides and fishing nets, and the odd oily smell of sea crusted wood. 

There was one body separating Tuff from the front of the crowd, and as Fnord opened his mouth to bite the thigh if it Tuff frantically grabbed his ears and pulled, stopping him.  He could hear the words now, but they rushed past in his mind like static, meaningless and unclear.  He was panting hard.

He had made the decision to flee when the man in front of him heard his frightened panting and turned to look, frowning.  In that moment the space before him was clear, and as Tuff stood exposed, hunched down into his shoulders, hair falling over his eyes, he could see the man who was calling him out.

In his twenty years on this Earth Tuff had learned the pattern of many men, some more intimately than others.  He could spot the set of his father’s shoulders in a crowd, or the line of Viggo’s jaw anywhere, but he also recognized the motions of Stoik the Vast, the fearsome chief of the Berkian tribe, who had sometimes told him stories when he was a little child, sitting huddled with Hiccup and Snotlout around the feet of his chair.

He wasn’t vast anymore.  Grief and famine had carved his form down to muscle and sinew, and his muscles bulged as he raised the gronkle iron mace above his head, ready to smash it down into the pulverized crater if cobblestone he’d created.  His beard had begun to go grey, but his eyes were hard and flinty, cold with the will to kill.

Covering the chief’s weak shoulder, hook sharpened to a dangerous point, Gobber stood eyeing the crowd, axe swinging idly from his wrist and peg leg braced against Stoik’s live one.  Behind them, framed by the sails of the hunting fleet, their dragons shifted on the boards, huffing and ready to defend themselves.

The mace started to come down again, Stoik’s mouth open and screaming over the crowd, when he faltered.  The ball struck a stone askew and sent off sparks, Stoik lurching slightly.  Tuff frantically grabbed for Fnord’s ears and pulled hard enough to make him shriek, turning him around, but it was too late.  As Fnord charged screeching back into the crowd he heard the mace clatter against the pavers, and Gobber’s voice shout his name into the crowd.

The crowd parted for him, a brown haired boy with panicked tears starting down his face.  Tuff hoped that they would close behind him, but he heard two sets of feet pounding down the stones after him, unhindered by the crowd, and he couldn’t stop the pang of betrayal that met him.  Fnord, without guidance, was running to the only safe place he knew: home.

He could hear Stoik’s voice behind him now, the anguish as he called out for his son.  Fnord looked behind at their pursuers and abruptly veered off the cobble street, aiming for a drainage ditch that ran between the houses, or more specifically, the clay pipe that ran under the street. Tuff shrieked a warning too late, and while Fnord ghosted into the small cylinder Tuff slammed gut first into the pipe and gravel, filing his vision with stars and momentarily making Stoik seem unimportant.

Tuff felt painfully for the carabiners that attached his belt to the saddle, able to hear Stoik and Gobber’s footsteps slow as they approached him, wedged as he was.  The first one let go easily, but the second was trapped, and as he felt Stoik’s enormous bulk towering behind him Tuff pressed his face into the dirt and gravel that topped the pipe, hands cupping his cheeks and shaking.

“Hiccup.” Stoik whispered, and the word carried twenty years of love, worry, and pain that Tuffnut had no right to.  He heard gravel shift behind him as the man went knelt like a supplicant, and a wide, hot hand pressed against the small of his back.

“Don’t do this.” Tuff whispered, voice barely audible, and the hand clenched at him.

“Hiccup, whatever’s happened, it doesn’t matter to me.” He said urgently.  “I’m here to take you home.”

He could feel his chest tightening.  Under him Fnord was shaking, wedged, and Tuff was soon matching him, trembling violently under Stoik’s strangely gentle hand.

“Son…” he said, confusion and pain streaking the words, and Tuff shakily lifted his face from the ground.  Stoik’s hand clasped over his shoulder and began to turn him, and Tuff turned to watch with grey eyes as Stoik’s world fell apart.

 

“Move!” Viggo shouted, shouldering into the woman in front of him, as she gave way with a startled shout.  The crowd had moved to circle around the culvert at the end of his road, and as he fought his way to it he could hear the monotonous, shaking wail of a child drifting over the crowd.  One of Tuff’s little market friends had come busting into his workshop (soaking wet for some reason) and told him frantically that men on dragons were here looking for Hiccup.

He burst through to the front of the crowd, a scarecrow in bare feet and trousers, his bare torso smeared with soot and oil and his hair wild.  His pupils were constricted to pinpricks, and no part of his carriage spoke of authority. 

Tuff was lying in the bottom of the gully, out of his saddle and covered in dust.  He was bawling, open mouthed and childish, enormous tears streaming down his face.  Fnord was standing in front of him, a shield, and before them both stood men he barely had cause to recognize.  They stood, slack and staring, at Tuffnut, their expressions oddly lost.

Until they saw him, that is.  The dark ones eyes suddenly filled with fury and he was up and out of the ditch, mace raised above his head and bellowing.  Viggo looked up at it, lips curving into a strange smile.

“Where’s Hiccup?” the man bellowed, breath hot on Viggo’s face, and Viggo gave a giddy bark of laughter. The man began shaking him, Viggo an unresisting as a ragdoll.

“Leave him alone!” Tuff bleated, letting go of Fnord and starting to climb the side of the gully hand over hand.  He caught ahold of Stoik’s ankle and the man looked down at him with glassy unrecognition.  Tuffnut pulled at his pantleg, a pitiful site red faced and belly down in the dirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he bleated, face streaked with tears and snot.  “Don’t hurt him, I’m sorry!”

Bewilderment crossed Stoik’s face, chased away by stunned horror.  “Tuffnut?” he asked quietly.

Sobbing, Tuff turned his face to the ground, shaking and not letting go. Stoik threw Viggo back against the crowd and stooped, picking up Tuffnut instead.  The boy weighed almost nothing, and now that he looked closer he could see the henna staining his scalp where he’d dyed it.  He gave him a sharp shake.  “Where are the others?” Stoik’s voice asked desperately.

Tuff hiccoughed and sniffled. “D-dead.” He said, ruining all hope before it could bloom again.  “They’re all dead, I’m sorry!”

“Hiccup?  Snotlout?”

Tuff shook his head, reaching up to scrub at his face.  “Just me!” he hitched, knowing it was like offering a shit when you expected caviar.

Stoik dropped him, earning a yelp, and turned back around to face the man who’d done this.

“You.” Stoik said darkly, taking a step forward.  Viggo took an equal step back.  He was smiling.  How dare he be smiling?

Another step, and Viggo was penned in by the crowd.  He put his hands up disarmingly, face giddy.  Somewhere over the crowd another voice was shouting “Move!  Out of the way, move you’re fucking ass!”

Ryker was wading his way through the crowd, an apron tied around his neck.  The small woman following in his wake was less visible, clutching a small white dragon to her chest.  Ryker burst through and leveled Stoik with an even glare, pushing him back.  He squared off against Stoik, Viggo hidden almost entirely behind his back, and cracked his knuckles perfunctorily. 

“You want to beat up my baby brother,” he growled “You’re going to have to get through me first.”

Stoik and Gobber glanced at each other, then Gobber moved up beside him, standing together to defend each other’s weak spots.  Ryker’s face suddenly blinking with shock was their first sign to look down, only to see a slip of a woman standing between the two sides, eyes wide and mouth set into a harsh line.  She was a little older than Stoik, her hair already starting to grey, and looked as though she might easily be trampled.

She took a step back into Ryker, pushing him, and he took a startled step back into Viggo.  Both boys looked down at her owlishly, and as she reached her arms out to pen them in Stoik realized she was protecting them.

“Mum, what are you doing?” he heard Viggo say anxiously.

The woman didn’t answer.  Ryker was looking around, trying to find a way around her, and Stoik stopped all three by bringing the mace up to her face, glittering spikes an inch from her nose.  Three pairs of eyes widened identically.

“Which one of them did this?” Stoik growled.

The woman’s expression was blank, confused, but he saw Ryker and Viggo glance at each other, like children in trouble.

Stoik pointed at the ground where Tuff lay sniffling, an abbreviated effigy of his dead son.  The look of panic that flashed across Viggo’s face when his mother glanced back at him nervously was all he needed to know.

“Viggo.” He said slowly, rolling the name I his mouth like a treat.  “You.  You were the one obsessed with my son.  What did you do to them?  Are all of them dead?  Is he the only one left?”  His words were almost pleading, tainted with anguish.

Ryker’s hand reached back to cover Viggo’s mouth and stop him from answering, but the younger brother darted out from behind him, into the middle of the clearing.  He bounced on his toes there a moment, giddy and smiling with an odd, frantic glaze in his eyes.  Stoik saw Ryker’s expression collapse into dread, and slowly turned, bringing the mace around to bear at Viggo.

Viggo’s eyes darted across faces in the crowd, wiping his hands on the thighs of his trousers.  Ryker tried to move after him but Gobber slipped in the way, shaking his head warningly. 

“What did you do to him, Viggo.” Stoik said darkly. “What did you do to my son?”

“I killed him.” Viggo blurted immediately, voice a bit high and tremulous.  The crowd began murmuring, glancing to each other, and he let out a high, uncomfortable laugh, dragging a palm down his face.  “I wanted him, but I couldn’t catch him, so I rigged a ship with chlorine gas and baited them in.  They came from downwind, and I left Lars with very precise instructions on when to release the gas.  He was supposed to release it at a point when Hiccup was out of range.” He stopped to swallow, eyes flitting from face to face to see their reactions.  He hardly cared about the mace. 

“Lars was an idiot to the end and released the gas too early.” He continued, looking for the face of Lars’ widow. He didn’t see her, but he supposed she’d find out soon enough that her husband hadn’t died fighting dragons like he’d said.  “Some of it blew back onto the deck and killed him, the rest spread out and knocked the dragons out from under them.  They were struggling in the sea, dying, and I ordered a volley of cannonfire to finish them off.  Except Hiccup had flown back down to try to save them, and he got caught in the line of fire.”

It had all come out in a clean, quick confession, rehearsed a million times in his head.  Ryker finally made his way out from behind Gobber and started towards him, but Viggo darted off lightly, starting to circle the perimeter of the crowd at a brisk walk while he talked.  It felt unstoppable, like a boil that had been festering inside him for a year had burst open, and there was nothing to do about the noxious flood except feel the sweet relief of pressure finally letting go.

Stoik didn’t have to prompt him, he continued all on his own, nimbly avoiding Ryker’s grabbing hands.

“I really, really wanted to play Maces and Talons with your son.” He babbled, jumping the ditch and pinning himself between a wall and the gully where Tuff still sat crying.  Ryker stared at him, not trying to jump it.  “I wanted to play against him and I wanted to bend him over the game board when I won.  But the shot caught him in the head, and he just…laid there, for days.”

All eyes were on him.  Viggo flashed a grin that looked more like a rictus than a smile.  “I killed him with my own hands, Stoik.” He said, holding them up for the man to see.  “I caved in his head while I fucked him.”

Stoik suddenly roared and started for the gully but Ryker tackled him, knocking him onto the ground.  Stoik flung Ryker off and into the crowd, and before the man got up his mother was between them again, pushing a hand against both their chests and straining to keep them apart.

“Stoik!” Viggo called, making the man turn on him again. 

“Viggo, shut up” Ryker snapped, but his brother ignored him.

“Stoik, don’t you want to know what I did to Tuffnut?”

The viking chief flared.  “You cut his legs off, you bastard!”

“I did!” Viggo laughed.  “I really did!  I first cut it off to match Hiccup, his hair, too, but then infection set in, and well…septicemia makes fools of us all.”

Around him the crowd had gone quiet, a hundred blank faces all staring into him.  Viggo felt lighter than he had in years.  He hopped back over the ditch like he were a feather, walking gracefully and purposefully around his mother and into Stoik’s reach. 

“Do you want me to tell you how I fucked him on the operating table?” He continued, meeting Stoik’s eyes and beaming.  “I wasn’t even thinking of your son by then, but still with his hair short, calling him Hiccup.  He almost died.”

The mace rose up, Stoik’s face a perfect mask of righteous fury, and Viggo stood with his face upturned to it, welcoming the blow. 

It didn’t fall.  Thin arms threw themselves over his head, pushing him down and practically laying on top of him.  Viggo stumbled back, almost falling, but his mother was pressing his head to her chest with inhuman strength, curling her narrow frame over her son.  Within an instant Ryker was towering over both of them, feet braced and eyes blank in readiness, ready to defend. 

“Don’t hurt him!”

The street crashed into a sudden and horrified silence.  Ryker was looking into Stoik with panicked indecision, frozen, while behind him Viggo’s eyes were wide, mouth slack and open as he slowly turned his eyes up towards his mother.

“Don’t hurt him.” She pleaded again, voice rough.  Ryker spun to look, but his eyes fixed on Viggo, not their mother, and Viggo saw it.  The younger Grimborn’s eyes glossed over with a kind of vacant horror as she ignored him, streaming blue eyes turned to Stoik.

Everyone was looking at Viggo, not Rose.

Tuff pulled himself up over the edge of the ditch, wet eyes wide as he anxiously watched Viggo. 

“There’s something wrong with him!” Rosie pleaded, and Tuff winced.  “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry for what my boy did, but there’s something wrong with him, he hasn’t been right since he was a little boy!”

The crowd was silent, the only sound in town the distant roar of the ocean, the soft sounds of chickens, and Fnord huffing and whining from inside the drainage pipe.  With all eyes on Viggo the man now seemed to shrivel, slowly curling in on himself despite the grip his mother had on him. 

“I know what he’s done!” she continued, voice carrying clearly over the silent street, for everyone to hear.  “And I know that killing my boy wont bring yours back!  Please!” her voice cracked.  “please, I’ll watch him better, I won’t let him go on his hunting trips, I’ll even make him move back in, just please, don’t hurt him!”

Slowly, Stoik’s eyes lifted and he saw the faces in the crowd, all turned to the pair on the ground, or more appropriately, Viggo.  Dragonhunters as well as their wives and children were watching their leader cower under his mother on the ground, hiding behind his brother.

Behind him Tuff’s hoarse voice pleaded childishly “I wanna go home.”

Rage dissipating Stoik turned around, looking down at where the boy was laying on his belly in the dirt, arms outstretched to grasp at his boots.  His face was red from crying and his body ended abruptly, pathetic and worm like.  He took a step back, and Gobber fortunately took a step forward, bending down to catch Tuff’s hands and help him up onto his hip.  “I wanna go home.” He said again, voice trembling and small, and Gobber shot his chief a look, laying a soothing hand on Tuff’s forehead.

“Lets go, Chief.” He said softly.  “We got what we came for.”

The hadn’t.  But Stoik slowly began to move away, towards the crowd and the dock, and Gobber picked up Tuff like he was a toddler, holding him on his hip.  Tuff put his arms around Gobber’s neck, wet eyes falling on Viggo, who had stopped trying to hold himself up, instead hanging limply in his mother’s grip.

Gobber turned, and in front of them Ryker relaxed, sighing and shifting position, watching them go with only a small amount of trepidation.  As they walked away Viggo suddenly started to squirm.

“Wait!” he called, trying to get his head out of his mother’s grip.  She didn’t let go, and Ryker immediately fell on him, trying to pin him onto the cobbles.

“Wait!” His voice came again, higher and more frantic.  “Stoik!”

The crowd parted neatly for the viking chief, unwilling to tangle, and behind hi Tuff heard Fnord’s claws scrabbling against the cobbles as he ran to catch up.

Tuffnut heard Viggo scream his name as they reached the docks, Skullcrusher sniffing at him and then snorting, dismissing him.  The call was plainative, his real name, drifting across the buildings.  Gobber set him on Grump, between his thighs, and as the island began to fade into the distance Tuff leaned back against Gobber’s chest and began to shake.  The shaking turned into laughter, tears streaming down his face, and the Vikings rode back with him in silence, his eerie laughter the only sound over the great empty sea,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please let me know what you think in the comments!

**Author's Note:**

> I did totally warn you. Leave your thoughts and criticisms in the comments.


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